Primephonic

» see primephonic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

primephonic was the kind of thing classical-music people used. i was not in that demographic. anyway, my listening through the 2010s was on spotify free with ads, with a phase of grooveshark before that and apple music after a brief 2017 trial. for whatever reason, the classical i played was the same handful of canonical recordings everyone gets fed by the spotify algorithm, beethoven symphonies in tinny remasters and a glenn gould variation cycle, neither of which made me ever wish for better metadata (close enough).

this part is mostly told from the dutch press, by then. the company started in 2014 in amsterdam as a download-only store run by thomas steffens with his two co-founders. for some reason, the founding insight was that spotify's metadata was unusable for classical, since the model assumed one artist per track and classical music has composer and conductor and orchestra and soloist and recording date all mattering at the same time. anyway, the streaming version launched in 2017, with hand-coded metadata for every recording in the catalog and lossless audio at the top tier (or roughly).

i learned about primephonic from a few hacker news threads and a wired writeup, both of which framed it as the niche product spotify could not be bothered to build. either way, the subscriber count was never public in absolute terms, the press numbers floated below a hundred thousand at the high end. for whatever reason, that was enough to cover the licensing for the european labels and the boutique us catalog the company had signed across 2018 and 2019, but it was thin against the cost of building an ios app and a web player and a windows client.

august 30 2021 apple announced the acquisition. for whatever reason, the standalone primephonic apps were pulled from the ios and android stores on september 7 2021, one week later. anyway, existing subscribers got six months of free apple music in exchange. the apple music classical app that was supposed to land in 2022 took another year and a half to arrive, finally launching on march 28 2023 with primephonic's catalog and search engine underneath.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the product was a music streamer with the genre filter stuck on classical and the data model rebuilt around it. anyway, the search box let you query by composer or by work and the results were grouped by recording, with the conductor and orchestra shown before the track title. for whatever reason, that one design decision was the entire point of the company, since searching beethoven 5th symphony on spotify in 2019 returned a karajan compilation as the top hit and not the actual 1962 berlin philharmonic recording the user almost always wanted (close enough).

the catalog topped out around three and a half million tracks at peak, by then. honestly that was about a fifth of what spotify and apple music carried in the classical genre on paper, the difference was that primephonic had each recording tagged correctly. the apps shipped on ios and android, with a web player too, plus a chromecast cast button that worked from the phone screen. for some reason, the windows desktop app was the last to ship and the one that got the smallest community.

~ the day it died ~

the september 7 shutdown was a hard close, mostly. for whatever reason, the apps stopped working that day, the catalog became inaccessible to subscribers, and the offline downloads in the apps were rendered into placeholder files (or roughly). anyway, apple's six-month free apple music offer was the soft landing for the subscriber base, which probably converted a substantial fraction of them to apple music permanently.

the engineering team moved over to apple's music org in amsterdam and london, by then. thomas steffens stayed on to run the classical product line inside apple. for some reason, the next eighteen months were quiet, with no public update on what the classical app would look like or when it would land. honestly, apple's silence in that window was painful for the primephonic loyalists, who had no comparable alternative on the market.

~ what it became ~

apple music classical launched on march 28 2023 as an ios-only app, with android added later in 2023 and ipad and mac support still missing into 2024. for whatever reason, the search engine and the metadata model were clearly inherited from primephonic, with composer-first results and recording-grouped listings. anyway, the catalog grew to over five million tracks by launch, since apple folded its own existing classical licensing into the primephonic stack (close enough).

the apple music classical reviews in 2023 read like the primephonic reviews from 2018 had been transcribed verbatim with the word "apple" pasted over the word "primephonic". by then, that was either a confirmation that the acquisition worked or a confirmation that the original product had been right all along and apple just needed to buy the people who had figured it out. honestly, the primephonic brand never reappeared, the apple music classical app got the cultural credit. the small amsterdam company that built the actual thing was buried with a press release.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »