Apple has launched Apple Music Classical, a standalone music streaming app for Apple Music subscribers. It will allow them to find any recording in the world’s largest classical music catalogue with fully optimised search and experience the music in a new way with immersive Spatial Audio. It offers the ability to browse expertly curated playlists, insightful composer biographies, and descriptions of thousands of works.
The app boasts over 5-million tracks, making it home to the world’s largest classical music catalog, covering the spectrum from celebrated recordings to forgotten gems. For beginners, the hand-picked Editor’s Choice curation is a great place to start. And for those more familiar with a particular work, the app offers fully optimised search capabilities.
Apple Music has partnered with many of the greatest classical institutions in the world to bring listeners new, unique, and exclusive content and recordings. These include the Berlin Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Opéra National de Paris, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Vienna Philharmonic.
Apple Music Classical will also host several live performances featuring a few of these partners at Apple Store locations around the world as part of the Today at Apple programming.
Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, Oliver Schusser, said: “We love music — that’s really what we’re all about — and classical music is foundational to music of all genres. Apple Music Classical is a dedicated app that is great for classical experts as well as anyone who is new to classical, with the largest classical music selection in the world, the very best search and browse capabilities, the most premium sound experience with Spatial Audio, and thousands of exclusive recordings. We believe this is the very best classical music streaming experience available anywhere, and for us, this is just the beginning”.
Apple Music is also working closely with some of today’s most renowned classical composers, artists, and musicians.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma was involved in early conversations about the need for such an app: “Classical music — and all of culture — is fundamentally about connection, about forging bonds of understanding across time and space. It’s innovations like this that make that connection possible, that give us space for our curiosity to run, to rediscover the familiar, and to rejoice in the unexpected.”