“Idagio streams classical music, from Gregorian chants to the minimalist movements of Philip Glass,” writes Benedikt Kammel at Monday’s (5/20) Bloomberg.com. “The genre … requires an organizing structure unlike that of popular music, which is easily sorted by song, album, and artist…. Till Janczukowicz … co-founded Idagio in 2015 after two decades managing classical musicians…. Today Idagio has about 90 employees [in] Berlin … and … Bratislava, Slovakia. The team has gathered tracks from 1,000 labels, manually writing in data such as composer, soloist, instruments, conductor, and studio or live…. Janczukowicz says Idagio has been downloaded more than 1 million times, though he declines to say how many people pay the $9.99 monthly fee for full access. Spotify, by contrast, just hit 100 million paid subscribers. He’s not the only player in the field: A U.S.-Dutch rival called Primephonic was founded in 2017…. ‘The market needs a good classical music app, because neither Spotify nor Apple can credibly claim to serve that audience,’ says Alice Enders, research director at media consultant Enders Analysis Ltd. ‘The challenge for Idagio is to convert the CD people, who are often very attached to their libraries.’ ”
Posted May 22, 2019
