Tons of Music, Serious Value

Classical music lovers, your time is now. The new Apple Music Classical app is finally here with millions of tracks featuring orchestral, ensemble, and solo music, new and old, from heralded classics to experimental works from rising stars. And best of all, if you have Apple Music, it’s all free.

Leveraged from Apple’s acquisition of Primephonic in 2021, the new app is essentially an extension of Apple Music, offering a similar but separate interface that’s streamlined and specifically targeted to serve up classical music across centuries. The interface is beautiful and inviting, designed to usher in newbies to the genre while also offering a deep catalog and extensive search tools for longtime fans.

Search isn’t always as intuitive as it could be, and there are also some missing features (shuffle anyone?). But Apple Music Classical is a great start, making it much easier than traditional streaming apps for users to curate playlists, discover new favorites, and explore all the genre has to offer. And since it’s free for those with an Apple Music individual, student, or family subscription, it’s a great value—and a tempting new reason to ditch other streamers for Apple’s service.

A Polished Interface

Opening the Apple Music Classical app will evoke déjà vu for Apple Music users, and if you’re acquainted with Apple’s streamer, you’ll have an immediate leg-up when it comes to getting started. The new app’s design is stylish and clean, laid out in slick tiles to separate genres, periods, and even individual instruments. It’s also loaded with little bits of history, from composer backgrounds and bios to the history of classical music itself.

Those who aren’t experienced with Apple Music will have a higher learning curve, especially if you’re looking for something specific, but if you’re just here to explore, it’s easy to dive in. The Listen Now section, available from the tabs at the bottom of the main interface, is the easiest way to get started and also the most fun to explore.

There you’ll find a scrolling list of genres, artists, and formats—like Spatial Audio—as well as new releases from composers and/or ensembles. This section also acts as a guide for newcomers, with pages like “The Story of Classical Music,” a multi-page introduction to everything from the Baroque era to 21st-century composers and even Western music’s early Medieval and Renaissance stages.

Also at the bottom is a general search tool, a Library tab to start curating your favorite Artists, Tracks, and Playlists (with multiple other ways to categorize), and a tab for the hefty Browse tool. It’s the Browse page that can be a little daunting, especially if you’re like my parents, who are major classical music fans, but sometimes struggle with modern tech.

That said, Browse is also helpfully broken down into more subheadings, with the Catalog tab serving as the default discover tool. There you’ll find categories like Composers, Periods, and Genres, as well as Conductors and Ensembles. This is the easiest place to find choral groups and works as well, which is something the app tends to lean away from on the Listen Now page.

It’s not all that surprising since choral music makes up a relatively small subsection of the classical genre overall, but for fans (and former performers) like me, I wouldn’t mind finding more explorational tools for choral works on the Listen Now page. You also won’t find choral music under Browse’s “Instruments” subheading, though you will find sections for each of the major vocal ranges.

There’s also plenty of curated music under the Browse section’s Playlists subhead, again organized in rows of helpful tiles. It can all feel a little like Chris Nolan’s famous “tumble down” film style as you slide deeper into each subsection, but it’s also rather exciting to find so much curated music at your fingertips. I do have one quibble with the Browse section’s curated playlists in that they lean heavily on more established composers, which serves as something of a theme for the app itself.

For instance, in the Composers Undiscovered section, you might expect to find a list of new or lesser-known composers, but instead, it’s lesser-known works from the most popular and established names like Brahms, Stravinsky, Mozart, and Shubert. The Browse tab’s playlist section serves up an entire tile for Beethoven’s works alone. Not that he isn’t one of the greatest musical geniuses of any age, but as someone fairly familiar with the musical icon, I’d appreciate the chance for more exploration of less-established classical artists as well.

Tons of Great Music

Part of the reason the Browse section can be a bear to navigate is that there’s just so much here to explore. Love Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite?” There are dozens of versions available when searching under “Albums” or under the composer himself. You’ll find all of Beethoven’s symphonies in multiple recordings, of course, but also some John Cage music and even a little Dave Brubeck.

If you look by Ensemble or Orchestra, you’ll be dazzled by the list of available artists, from the London Philharmonic to local choral groups. Not all of them have multiple works, and some seem to have none listed here at all. For giggles, I checked out the local Portland State University Chamber Choir page and found it blank (it seems to be removed from the list now). I’m not surprised there weren’t any selections, but I was surprised to see the name there in the first place.

On the other hand, the Ohio State University Men’s Glee Club was surprisingly well represented, with multiple recorded works. The vast majority of even the least-known groups I explored had at least one or two recordings to discover, leading down a fun rabbit hole of new music to explore. That’s not to mention the 700+ playlists available, from music categorized by mood to curated lists from some of classical music’s biggest artists.

Alongside this rich tapestry of more traditional recordings, Apple Music Classical also houses a modest but welcome Film Music section. There you’ll find select works from powerhouses like John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, and James Horner. (And yes, that insanely popular Céline Dion song from “Titanic” is available.)

Apple also says all Apple Music Classical recordings are available in lossless audio quality—and there’s even a small list of tracks in Spatial Audio—available from the Listen Now tab. While there are still limited ways to play them (namely Apple’s AirPods headphones and the new HomePod), this is particularly exciting. Classical music is poised to be an excellent showcase for Spatial Audio due in part to the way it’s recorded live using a wide array of microphones placed in front of and above the artists in acoustically optimized venues.

Features and Options Are Still Limited

While there are plenty of cool ways to enjoy Apple Music Classical, as a brand new app (at the time of publishing), it’s missing some features many streamers now take for granted.

One notable omission is something you’d think would be a no-brainer in the modern streaming age: Shuffle mode. That’s something you’ll get in any contemporary streamer like Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal, but isn’t yet available here.

Since classical music is, for the most part, inherently designed to be experienced in coordinated movements rather than isolated snippets, this really only comes up in playlists. But if you’re interested in multiple listens of a playlist like Classical Chill, instead of just being able to randomize the different works, you’ve got to restart the playlist each time. That’s not exactly intuitive, and I’m hoping it’s something Apple will address in an update later.

Unlike traditional services like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify, there’s no apparent way to create “radio stations” from individual works or composers on Apple Music Classical. For example, if you tap on the triple-dot settings button above an album, song, or artist in the regular Apple Music app, you’ll see options like “Add to Library” or “Add to Playlist” but also the ability to “Create Station,” where the app will build a playlist based on the music or artist’s individual attributes. There appears to be no way to do this currently in Apple Music Classical.

There’s also no way to download music directly from the Apple Music Classical app, but there is a workaround. Per Apple: “You can’t download music in the Apple Music Classical app. But you can use the Apple Music app to download tracks, albums, and playlists that you’ve added to your Apple Music Classical library.”

Finally, for audiophiles, it can be difficult to take full advantage of Apple Music Classical’s high-resolution tracks. This isn’t a missing feature, per se, but it’s worth noting. The issue is mostly due to the limitations of the iPhone itself. Though Apple Music Classical tracks are available at up to 24bit/192kHz lossless resolution, your iPhone taps out at 24bit/48kHz, even when you’re using wired headphones. In order to listen to anything higher, you’ll need an external DAC (digital-to-analog converter) and, depending on your converter, potentially a separate headphone amp or speaker amplifier as well.

If you’re using wireless headphones, like the AirPods Max, you’ll get even lower resolution due to the limitations of Apple’s AAC Bluetooth codec. Most people will have a very hard time telling the difference (if they’re even able to at all) with wireless headphones, but if you’re looking to optimize your lossless listening experience, it’s something to keep in mind.

That said, it’s pretty awesome that the entire Apple Music and Apple Music Classical catalogs are available in lossless resolution—especially considering Spotify doesn’t offer lossless music at all.

Search Could Be Simpler

As touched on above, Apple Music Classical’s search can be confusing, in part because there are so many ways to discover music, but also because some functions just seem to be unintuitive.

If you tap on the Composer’s tile in the Browse section, for instance, the Composers come up by popularity rather than alphabetically by default. You can filter them to be arranged by Name if you tap on the red icon at the top right, but this may be confusing to new users and/or listeners without much streaming experience.

In addition, you can filter by Year of Birth, but this doesn’t actually offer an examination by year, but rather a sprawling list of composers listed from oldest (as in the year 1013) to youngest. This could be useful if you really know your stuff or just want to find the oldest composers in existence, but it’s not all that helpful if you’re trying to find composers from a specific era in a jiffy.

There are lots of other ways to find composers by era, and what’s available does a great job of using metadata to break down what could otherwise be a near-unnavigable list of artists, compositions, and genres. But a few tweaks could make things easier, especially for those less technically inclined.

Should You Subscribe to Apple Music Classical?

If you already have Apple Music, you don’t have to. That’s a pretty great perk just for being a part of the Apple Music club. If you don’t subscribe to Apple Music, and you’re a classical music enthusiast or a budding fan, this app is another tempting reason to cut ties with Spotify or other services, not to mention features you can’t get from the Swedish streamer like Spatial Audio and lossless tracks.

Apple Music Classical isn’t perfect. It’s missing some notable features, and search can sometimes be a challenge. But it’s a great start and something that could really be exciting for classical music fans looking for a simpler and more streamlined way to get their fix.