Apple Music Classical will bring some culture to your smartphone on March 28

Apple will release a version of Apple Music specifically for classical music later this month, the company announced today. The Apple Music Classical app, currently available for preorder on the App Store, will be separate from the main Apple Music app. But access to the service will be included with a $17-per-month Apple One subscription or most Apple Music subscriptions (excluding the basic $5-per-month Apple Music Voice tier).

In August 2021, Apple acquired a classical music service called Primephonic. If you’re wondering why classical music could benefit from a dedicated app, this PCMag article on Primephonic will answer that question: you can search for music not just by song title or composer, but also by the name of the orchestra playing it. he recorded it. him, or the person who conducted it, or information about soloists or other performers. Primephonic could also account for the different possible spellings of composers’ names, among other features.

Perhaps most importantly for a music streaming service, however, Primephonic used a royalty model in which payments were based on the amount of time songs were played rather than the number of times a song was listened to. song. Using a per-play model, someone listening to a 15-minute movement of a Beethoven symphony would generate as much revenue for artists as someone listening to a 90-second pop song.

Apple hasn’t specified how it plans to pay artists, but its press release announcing the Primephonic acquisition indicated that the service’s detailed metadata and “the best Primephonic features” would be included in Apple Music Classical when it launched.

The Apple Music Classical app is iPhone-only for now, though an Android version is apparently coming “soon” as well. There’s no word on Apple’s plans for iPad, macOS, or Windows; Windows only got its first version of the Apple Music app in preview earlier this year.