This reads like a spec for a startup opportunity. It's so clear to any one of us what the data model needs to look like and how to make search work. The only real issue is the human labor needed to do the data entry, and the licensing.
The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.
You'd be targeting a niche market, not only because of the 3% market mentioned in the article, but because I imagine that all "serious" classical fans (i.e. serious enough to switch to consider using a dedicated streaming service) is also likely to have a big album collection. In other words, you'd likely be targeting a very fast-saturated market.
And that's besides the legal/licensing horrors.
That being said, I think there might be some promise in an add-on for spotify (web-api / browser extension) or iTunes. Just extend the interface with some more metadata. Surely there are some good databases that can be relied on.
The other problem with this market as a business opportunity is that the audience is diminishing, aging and slow technology adopters.
Go to any classical music concert and you will see that under 30s are in the vast minority. Look at how many venues open each year playing modern popular music (ie pop, house, indie, etc) and how many open playing classical music. I'm an active classical music fan in London - one of the classical music capitals of the world - and I cannot name a single classical music venue that has opened within the past 3 years.
Your market is, quite literally, dying.
It's sad. It's a huge loss for us as young people. But the only way a classical music streaming service can survive is through association with one of the big (probably existing) platforms.
The market is actually fairly constant, because older people - usually middle class - gravitate away from pop and become more interested in classical music in middle age.
The Proms aren't going to go away, nor are concert series in most of the UK's bigger cities. Nor is Classic FM, which is pretty much just Spotify with DJ chat and someone else's playlist, and is a good gateway pusher to classical recordings.
And middle class families will keep giving their kids piano and cello lessons, because that's what they do.
What's happened more - according to people I know - is that the intake at the Royal College and the Royal Academy is almost exclusively posh kids now, because rich parents are the only ones who can afford to hothouse and support their darlings through the exams. It was much more diverse a couple of decades ago, because music education - all education, in fact - was much more freely available.
That will do more to kill classical music than Spotify's metadata will, because it will become something that isn't made available to most of the population.
Yep. And I was participating many years ago when we figured out a pragmatic way to handle the mapping between simple ID3 style fields and the complex needs of classical - so that non-classical aware media players were at least usable. I wrote the first draft of this: https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Classical
but I haven't looked at Musicbrainz for many years to see how the rules and tools have changed.
However - no-one else since has even tried to tackle this problem.
I have been telling people this for years, including people already running music businesses but they havent listened. Its a good market as people will pay more, even though the total market size is smaller.
The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.