For those asking why they "didn't just" improve the existing music app. This is the rebranded version of a service called Primephonic which they acquired last year. This is obviously way less work than trying to jam it into the existing app, so I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable decision.
From a different thread on HN about the same topic, some commenters mentioned that the information architecture and navigation required for classical music is different enough from other music to warrant its own app. I would be surprised if
Apple made a decision to cut corners on work and ship a product faster (because from their other products, they seem to be a company that believes in taking their time and delaying releases till they are done to a level that they deem satisfactory)
I have a lot of rap music which has the same problems today and would be solved by the metadata management in the Classical Music app. I dearly hope Apple will bring back some of the management from that app into the regular app, or allow non-classical music into the new app.
I have a strong feeling that they acquired Primephonic to eventually replace the primary Apple Music architecture. To your point, there’s a lot of cool functionality you can create with different performances of songs in all genres that could be a huge competitive advantage, but Apple Music currently struggles with simple metadata management.
No shade to the classical music enjoyers, I am one of them, but that is nowhere near a large enough market for the largest company in the world to acquire a niche app for the sole purpose of catering to them. It only makes sense to me if they’re after a tech stack that can be folded into their main service, and Apple almost always companies for their tech rather than their product (including Beats for Beats Music).
Rolling it out as a classical music app first is a pretty clever way to test new features and architecture at limited scale. I would 100% look to that app to see the potential future of Apple Music.
Yes, the structure is very different and having them both in one app would probably also make it confusing to users if views for the same like an "album view" look different just by clicking on different cover art associated with either Apple Music, or Apple Music Classical.
> because from their other products, they seem to be a company that believes in taking their time and delaying releases till they are done to a level that they deem satisfactory
This is definitely not the case for a long time already. Some people would probably say "Since Snow Leopard". If you use the Apple Music app on macOS, or really any recent macOS apps that was ported from iPadOS to macOS it's obvious that this is not true anymore. System Settings would be another such example.
Many types of music have additional requirements, at least for discovery. For example, how about cover songs? It would be nice to find every available version of All Along the Watchtower. This is not unique to classical so why not fix in the parent app?
There are still a ton of differences: contemporary music doesn't have the same divisions of works into movements separate from what appears on an album (you don't generally have covers of entire albums); while a cover of a particular song is a common search, it is far less common to try and find all covers by other artists from a particular artists (i.e. all piano works by Beethoven); and finally, most contemporary music has a single name meanwhile most famous classical works have many (opus/catalogue number, sonata number, nicknames, foreign language names, etc.).
As a bonus, most contemporary music probably also doesn't feature dozens of artists (while the whole orchestra usually isn't listed individually, all the soloists in an opera often are). That said, I think this is one area where apps have improved.
https://www.apple.com/hk/en/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-...