alt Hacker NewsSpotify is still bad for classical music because you can’t ex. search by composer or label of find alternative recordings of the same piece etc. If you know what album you want already its ok, but if you like classical you should really consider IDAGIO.
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Isn’t fundamentally the issue that for any symphony by Beethoven or whoever that there are thousands of recordings of performances? So if I decide I want to listen to a certain one then I also need to pick a particular performance that a particular orchestra did a certain time?
building recommendation systems for classical music has a simple data problem- most recommendation systems (for spotify and others) are based on simple user listening histories that look at "people that listened to X also listened to Y".
this is a problem for classical (and jazz) for two reasons a) these genres are not particularly popular on the platform so there are few unique users and b) the songs are LONG so listening sessions contain fewer songs.
track cooccurance based recs work well for popular genres, but these other genres need a different approach to recs and that's actually where AI could do really well by digging into the unstructured data associated with the tracks (sonic analysis of the song, biographical information about the composer, details about featured soloists, etc) rather than relying on piles of user behavior.
And if you want one subscription for popular & classical music, Apple Music is miles ahead of Spotify.
Music.app is already better than Spotify at handling the relevant metadata. But the dedicated Apple Music Classical app is roughly the same as IDAGIO.
(They bought IDAGIO's former competitor Primephonic to do it)