It still sees a higher percentage in terms of physical sales, because people like to have the booklet in their hands to read about the orchestras, the artists, the inspiration behind the programming of the tracks,” she said. “Classical requires a lot of background stories around it.
Head of business development Veronica Neo hopes that the contextual information will also appeal to classical listeners. That’s an approach that is not relevant for an all-in streaming provider.” “We have digitised that history and are putting all the information around the composer, the artists and the albums, and attaching them to the relevant arm of the tree. “If you think of classical-music history as a tree or a skeleton, that’s what we have used as our back-end,” said Eder. It will also provide information around this: someone clicking through to the Mozart page on the service will see what classical era he’s associated with which works he composed and then the recordings that have been made of those works. Primephonic’s approach will be to allow its users to search by composer, work, artist, ensemble, historical period, and genre. There is no ‘real’ recording… but it’s hard to find an overview of all the different recordings out there for a piece.” But with classical music you have the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, you might have the soloists, and all the recordings are cover versions. For pop music you have an album name, an artist name and individual tracks. “Also there are more layers and components.
You have the eras – medieval, renaissance, baroque, romantic – and you have the genres: orchestral, solo pieces, solo piano works, choral… These categories do not exist on other platforms,” he said. “Most of the other platforms talk about classical music as one genre, but classical music has a history of hundreds of years. Naxos launched its ClassicsOnline in 2015, although it has since shut down, but Grammofy, Idagio and Wolffy are three current (or soon-to-launch in Wolffy’s case) examples.īesides payout imbalances, Eder is targeting search as one of the main ways Primephonic can be better for classical music than the large general services. Primephonic is not the only streaming service focusing on classical music. Yet you have an orchestra involved, and other costs.” “If you have an album with three works that are each 20 minutes long, theoretically you are getting paid out for just three tracks. If you have a track that’s 20 minutes long, it gets the same payout as a two-and-a-half minutes track,” he continued. “The existing model is very challenging for the classical music industry. We’re paying every streamed second to the labels,” Primephonic co-founder and director Simon Eder told Music Ally ahead of the launch. “We are making a very transparent offer to the industry, which is paying per second. However, that pool will be divided according to listening time – down to the seconds level – rather than by the number of streams. Like generalist streaming services, it allots a pool of revenues – 60% in this case – for royalties. There is also an interesting model being used for Primephonic’s payouts.
#DOWNLOAD MUSIC FROM PRIMEPHONIC FREE#
After a 30-day free trial, Primephonic will charge £14.99 / $14.99 a month. Primephonic’s streaming service launches today in the UK and US, with a catalogue of more than 100k tracks, and licensing deals with Warner Classics and Sony Classical that will swell that total in the coming months.Ĭlassical labels Naxos, Harmonia Mundi, Chandos, Bis, and 2L also have music on the service, which will stream CD-quality audio – 16-bit FLAC files to be specific.įor now, the service will work in the browser, including a mobile-optimised version, with a native iOS app to follow later in the year. The latest company to launch a streaming service for classical music is Primephonic, building on the growth of its existing downloads store.