Best Classical Music Streaming Service – Idagio
Listening to classical music is a little different from listening to modern pop music. The music is structured differently – most recordings are not performed by their composers, and there is rarely one final recording of a piece. Often several works are released on one album. The track titles are very long, including the catalog number of the piece, the number of its movement, perhaps its speed and even its nickname given by fans. Most streaming services are not built for this. Some of them, and the best one is Idagio .
Why not Spotify?
Spotify and its main competitors are built for modern pop music that focuses on songs and albums (rather than movements), usually only has one “original” version of any given song, and is often split into playlists or randomly shuffled. Songs usually have the same overall length, and the relatively poor quality of streaming services files isn’t noticeable to most people.
Most of the classics have been recorded many times by different artists, often on different instruments, with dramatically different results. There is no single canonical record of a work, so it makes sense for a work to have a separate page where you can try out several records. “Benchmarking” major streamers is an awkward process that involves switching between albums and search results. And centuries of classical music in several genres are mostly combined into one genre. It is not easy to leaf through, say, new recordings of baroque organ music.
While many people still don’t see the difference between low and high quality streaming, it is most noticeable in orchestral productions, where compression can crush or muddy a wide range of audio. Spotify only offers speeds up to 320kbps, which is still below CD quality.
There is also a problem with the giant library of non-classical music. The search feature on most streaming services is designed to work with modern music and doesn’t work well with classical music. Search Apple Music for Goldberg Variations and you’ll get more results for an obscure techno band than a famous Bach song. The best Spotify score for Mozart is Queen Herbie’s new rap. If you’re a big fan of classical music, you will benefit from a streaming service that doesn’t include all other genres either. Fortunately, there are three of them.
Competition
The three classic streaming standouts are Primephonic, Naxos Music Library and Idagio. All three offer high-quality streaming, music sorting by work, and an easy-to-use mobile app. And searching for music in these apps will not lead to searching for a million rock songs.
The Naxos Music Library is a mansion. Its web player and mobile app looks outdated, there is no desktop app, you can’t download music, and the service costs more than the competition ($ 21 / month and up). But it has a sizable library of other NPR-style music, including jazz, peace, folk and contemporary instrumental music. You can try it free for 15 minutes (and another 15 minutes in incognito mode).
Primephonic ($ 8 / month for 320kbps streaming, $ 15 / month for lossless streaming) has the best collection of “mood” playlists – in particular, it has a productivity playlist that Idagio lacks. The Music Favorites tab is very handy and includes playlists composed by classic artists. It has a nice modern mobile app and web interface. But otherwise it looks like a slightly worse version of Idagio. No desktop app, only mobile and web apps. Although you can watch all versions of the piece, playing one after the other is still a little awkward. You can try this for two weeks without a credit card.
Idagio
Idagio costs $ 10 a month including lossless streaming. (You can also stream at 320 or 192 kbps for saving data.) You can try it for 30 days, but you must provide your credit card information, so if you don’t want to be charged, don’t forget to cancel .
Idagio has the prettiest mobile app and is the only desktop service. The desktop version looks like a simplified Spotify, but it has all the basic features. The excellent ‘Discover’ tab includes new music, exclusive recordings and offers sorted by period, instrument and genre (chamber and opera, “sacred vocals, etc.”). It also features performers and conductors, as well as playlists from critics and other experts.
On desktops and mobile devices, you can create playlists or personal collection. There are no social features, contacts, or friend feeds here, which is honestly a relief. There are no podcasts. Things seem a little cleaner and more minimalistic, although coming from Spotify they can also seem scarce.
Idagio is great for viewing all versions of a given work. In addition to specific albums, recordings, artists and composers, Idagio also includes “works” in its search results. So, for example, you can select Eric Satie’s Gymnopedia and listen to each version, sorted by release date or popularity. You can filter the results by artist or instrument. This is a great use of additional data types applicable to classical music. It’s also a great way to discover unusual variations of a piece.
There are some annoying restrictions. On my Mac, I could not use my media keys – the dedicated play / pause buttons on my keyboard – to control Idagio, even after I closed all my other media applications. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. And the iOS app doesn’t have shuffle or repeat functionality.
Is it worth it?
If you occasionally listen to classical but mostly modern music, then you shouldn’t double the amount you pay to stream. Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Music still have most of the classical music and probably everything you will ever need and you can mess around with finding them and their interface. Spotify and Apple have good classical music playlists, you should be fine.
But if you listen to classical music every day and can name more than a handful of composers or pieces, $ 10 a month isn’t much for everything Idagio has to offer. You probably want to hang your Spotify too, but that’s only $ 20 a month for more music than you could ever hear in one lifetime.