Apple Music Classic is now available to download worldwide with over 5 million titles. Offered as part of an Apple Music subscription, it’s designed to make it easy to find things unique to classical music, including orchestras, conductors, musicians, and more.
The app comes from Primephonic, Apple’s streaming service acquired in 2021. It was originally slated for release in late 2022, but earlier this month Apple revealed a firm release date of March 28.
The app is available on iPhones running iOS 15.4 or later, with an Android version “coming soon”. As you’d expect, it delivers high-resolution 192KHz/24-bit lossless audio quality, with ‘thousands’ of recordings also offered in spatial audio. It also allows classical music enthusiasts to browse composer biographies, descriptions of key works, “in-depth” guides and more. The search function has been rewritten for classical music queries and lets you choose from over 700 curated playlists.
However, there is little missing from the main Apple Music app. Apple Music Voice Plan subscribers can’t use Classical, there’s no native iPad app yet, and you can’t download music for offline listening. The navigation bar only has four buttons (Listen Now, Browse, Library, and Search) because there’s no Radio shortcut. Other than that, it should appeal to classical music fans looking for genre-specific stuff, especially hard-to-locate performances.
