The whispers swirling around orchestra pits London to NY were true. Tech giant Apple has confirmed that later this month it'll launch Apple Music Classical, a streaming service and app featuring the globe’s largest classical music catalogue. The world of streaming – listening to unlimited music through a desktop or smartphone app for a fixed monthly fee – is dominated by pop, rock and hip hop. Its growth has been fuelled by Gen-Z and millennial listeners who prefer Horrible Bunny to Bach and think that Chopin is something you do on ASOS.com. But this is all about to modify with Apple’s raising of its metaphorical conductor’s baton. Some may shrug at this news. It's been five years since listening via streaming services such as Spotify overtook buying or downloading songs as the main way we consume music.

And there’s already classical music on its existing Apple Music streaming platform, as well as on Spotify and tiny specialist streaming platforms such as Idagio and Stage . So what if Apple chomps further into the market? Well, for a start, nothing has been done on this scale before. Apple Music is set to have one hundred ten million paying subscribers by two thousand twenty-five, according to JP Morgan (existing subscribers will obtain Apple Music Classical for free). Apple’s classical catalogue will contain five million tracks. To date, using a mainstream classical streaming service has been love trying to play a cor anglais with a blindfold on ­– impossible to navigate and disappointing to hear to.

For Apple’s service to work, the regulation book will have to be totally ripped up. Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify, says classical music has never really fitted the established streaming model. He remembers going for a meeting about streaming at classical label Decca Records when he was at the Swedish company. Page was accompanied by “the best data scientists” Stockholm could offer. “We came out love we were hit by a bus,” he recalls. “[We thought] ‘This doesn’t work. The way you obtain paid, the time it takes to compose, the nature of collaboration, how classical music is classified. This is a square peg, and streaming is a round hole.’” So how precisely will it work, and what're the specific hurdles that Apple needs to clear? The first hurdle relates to metadata, the digital equivalent of lib index cards.

This sounds dry, but excellent streaming relies on whip-smart of metadata, which describes to the listener the content being streamed and helps them discover new and similar music. In the population world, metadata is a relatively blunt instrument; listeners look for by song or album title, by the artist’s name, or by genre. It’s distant more complicated with classical and opera music. Listeners necessity to be able to look for by composer, orchestra, soloist, conductor, record label and interpretation. There are 1.658 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, according to the Discogs website. to start? Apple says that “intuitive” browsing features on the classical app will let people look for its lib by composer, conductor or even a record’s catalogue number.