Sonos replaced my dead eight-year-old player for a reasonable price (earlier post) and threw in a coupon for 60 days of unlimited Google Play Music. I decided to try out this competitor to Rhapsody, Spotify, Pandora, et al. I clicked on a classical “radio” station. Unlike any classical FM station, but like the other streaming services, this turns out to be classical tracks selected at random. So you might get the second part of a string quartet followed by the first part of a symphony composed 100 years earlier.
Is it illegal to stream complete classical albums or at least four tracks in a row so that listeners can hear a whole symphony? If not I can’t figure out why none of the streaming services offer this from their “radio” stations. (Paying Rhapsody customers can stream entire albums, so it definitely is not illegal if the user selects the music rather than the service/station.)
I would guess it’s just the algorithm. When you put a pop channel on shuffle play or random you generally don’t want 4 songs in a row from the same artist. The classical fans probably represent such a small percentage of users that whatever complaints they may have filed are just going into a black hole.
From the never blame malicious intent when incompetence also explains the situation department….
Someone who knows this better than me will explain it clearer, but…
It’s a licencing thing. Playing a “radio” station from these services means they can pay less royalty buy using a “radio” model but it imposes restrictions, like the above: no going one track back, limited song skipping, no whole album from an artist etc. You can see this best with Pandora.
And yeah this completely breaks down with classical music.
I agree that:
Playing a “radio” station from these services means they can pay less royalty buy using a “radio” model but it imposes restrictions,
Most classical music itself is long out of copyright, if it ever was in it. So the real question is which recordings are being played. Google should have access to many free recordings in its vast databases, maybe it plays those?
With Google Play Music you are not limited to streaming from “radios”. Instead, you can search their sizeable collection of classical music albums and play one at a time.
Tiago: I am aware that it is possible to pick albums and stream them from Rhapsody, Google, et al. But I don’t want to do the work of a DJ. I want someone else to entertain me with a variety of music, as standard classical stations do, but without commercials.
Chris: Maybe you’re onto something. The classical tracks that Google picks on their radio station are not from name-brand labels and are not identified with artists.
This is one reason I never bought any iPod or clone or any of the stream-music-over-your-home-wireless box. Last time I looked (many years ago, now) they _all_ mixed-and-matched movements from random pieces.
I’m sure there’s no technical reason – the category tag “classical” should be enough to trigger special processing, and there’s nearly always enough information in the track names that a sufficiently inclusive set of regexs (to name just one ever present technology) could group tracks from albums into complete works in order.
I decided that the program managers in charge of producing the firmware for these devices just didn’t care, probably because they had an accurate idea of how much it would cost to support such a function vs. the small percentage of their target market that actually listens to classical music.
Basically what David said. Classical music is an increasingly irrelevant and tiny segment of the music business – the average age of the audience is between 65 and dead and 99% white – these are demographics not known for their free spending ways. These people have money but the reason they have it is because they won’t part with it, so the fact that they are rich does nobody any good.
The streaming services (and devices) are designed with 3 minute pop music tracks in mind and if the model doesn’t fit classical music (and it doesn’t) well then , too bad. Be glad that they bother with it at all. Most of what’s on the classical album section of Amazon Prime are things like “Classical Music to Make Your Baby Smart” or “Mozart’s Top Hits”, from 3rd rate pickup orchestras (the “Radio Symphony of Bratislava”). Classical music survives on broadcast radio almost exclusively on non-profit (i.e. charity based) stations – it doesn’t really exist as a business anymore.
Speaking of radio, if you want to stream classical music, rather than going with the streaming services (Pandora, etc.) try something like Tune-in radio and stream actual (classical) radio stations (not “radio” stations), which I think are more like what you have in mind.
http://tunein.com/search/?query=classical
and scroll down to “Stations”
or download the app to a tablet/phone
Izzie: I agree with what you say about the audience but for subscription services they can make money on the “long tail”. HBO doesn’t need to have every show appeal to a wide range of Americans, for example. HBO just needs to make sure that every American loves at least one show enough to pay the monthly fee. So that still leaves the question of why the programmers of these “pseudo-radio” stations don’t make them play one album at a time rather than one track at a time.
(I had heard that, in response to lobbying from the pop music industry, the government had made it somehow more difficult to stream albums.)
(What’s an album?)
philg: re the “long tail” maybe, then again, maybe not. SiriusXM, a month or two ago, cut back their three classical channels (standard, pop, opera) to two (merging standard with pop) in order to make room for yet another “fusion” channel, whatever that is.
3 hip-hop, 6 country, 5 “dance/electronic”, 27 (!!!) of finely delineated “rock”, 5 comedy talk, and nearly infinite sports, but the classical station had to go.
I don’t think it was lack of available channels. I think they didn’t want to pay for the programmers/announcers for 2 channels rather than one.
(BTW: If you _do_ want to subscribe for their last remaining classical music channel: When they play an entire multi-movement work, they play it in order!)
I think there is a different streaming royalty structure for “radio” type services where you don’t get to select the exact content being served (only the general category) and “on-demand” services where you can choose a specific song. This makes some sense. I’m not sure that the requirement that you don’t serve up entire albums is exactly stated in the law, but it’s difficult to argue that you are serving up “random” tracks if you play 12 tracks from the same artist in a row.
As I said before, there are plenty of streaming classical stations that do exactly what you want (although when I say plenty, a lot of them all play the same stuff – for example, the “Classical 24” network is featured on countless NPR webstreams), they are just not part of the mainstream services like Pandora, Spotify, etc. Those services are constructed on a “pop music” , 3 minute track model and they would have to go out of their way to reconfigure these services to make them friendly to classical music. What is a profitable (or at least break even niche) to a classical music station with a webstream is to them just a pain in the butt and they probably think that we should be grateful that they bother with a classical stream at all. Royalty questions aside, it would not be very hard for them to tag the 3 movements of a symphony so that they played in order, but even doing that much is probably more coding than they are interested in doing for a tiny minority of their listeners.
Some of these comments are a bit silly, aren’t they? I like classical music and I am not anywhere near 65 years old. I also like a lot of other styles of music.
If anything was “increasingly irrelevant,” it would certainly be pop music. A generation or two ago, you had giants like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or Elvis who were not only popular, but almost defined the tastes of a generation of young people. You don’t see those kinds of audiences any more. The big pop music audience of the 60s and 70s has fragmented into dozens of different subgroups: rap, bluegrass, country, electronic, you name it. Sales of old albums recently outpaced sales of new ones: http://www.stereogum.com/1098892/old-albums-outselling-new-albums-for-the-first-time-ever/news/ The pop music groups we have now are soulless corporate shills– hired performers, not artists, and only the dumbest kids these days could like a pop music group unironically.
It’s no great mystery why Sirius is cutting back channels: they are failing commercially. There are technological reasons why they’re losing out. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I also suspect that another reason they are losing out is because their music selection is bland, bland, bland! My car came with a trial subscription to Sirius, and I couldn’t find even one station worth listening to. If they could hire even one or two good college radio DJs, then there might be something worth listening to. As it is, you might as well be listening to any local top 40s station. Yes, my shitty local radio stations have “top hits of the [insert decade here]”, so why do I need Sirius?
Phil, just go to your local public library and pick up some CDs. The sound quality is superior to mp3s anyway (unless they’re 320 kilobit), and you’ll be able to get what you want. Or if you really must comply with our absurd copyright laws, then you can download classical music from musopen.org.