Apple launched a separate music app for Classical music this week, dedicated to the classical music genre, whilst continuing to work with your existing Apple Music subscription. I think this is an interesting idea, and if I hadn’t been taking a pause from monthly challenges then 30 days of classical music could very much have been on the cards.

A separate app for classical music makes sense to me but I hadn’t given a lot of thought as to why they actually need it. All this music was previously available in the normal Music app so why the need to separate it?

Apple explains:

Classical music is different. It has longer and more detailed titles, multiple artists for each work, and hundreds of recordings of well-known pieces. The Apple Music Classical app is designed to support the complex data structure of classical music.

I agree that this can make things more complicated but I do wonder if whatever lessons have been learnt and changes made to make this app function better wouldn’t also work in the existing app. There are a LOT of versions of some songs, American Pie for instance has at least 15 different covers and that’s just before I got bored counting, who knows how many are actually there?

It’s an ongoing challenge to try and make all the world’s music accessible and I don’t underestimate it as a challenge, but I don’t know that separating it all out is the answer. If nothing else, you’re going to stumble across the very real problem of cross-overs, genre-blending, what actually counts as classical music these days?

I’ve already seen lots of guffawing social media at the film and game scores that are included, which to me is classical music but to others might not be. It feels like we might just be asking for trouble to try and define it!

But I think it’s good that Apple and others are constantly making the effort to make music discoverable, easier to access, and with shared curation to help guide the enjoyment and discussion. You have to start somewhere and we’ll soon find out whether or not separating things out works better than keeping everything under one roof.