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Six of the best audio streaming platforms for classical music in 2023

By , 05 April 2023

It’s been a busy two years since our 2021 article about classical music streaming. One of the two dedicated classical music platforms, Primephonic, has been acquired by industry giant Apple – and they have just released the new Apple Music Classical, based on Primephonic’s technology. The other, Idagio, has announced important initiatives outside their core streaming business. A third platform has been launched by Presto Classical, a UK retailer of CDs and sheet music.

Meanwhile, the music streaming market has come under intense scrutiny from a UK parliamentary committee. Spotify has come under similar pressure from members of the US Congress. And not a week goes by without someone making an announcement about concert or opera video streaming. It’s time for a refresh.

Once again, I’ve chosen six platforms to compare, each of which has an extensive collection of classical music recordings available on a “full catalogue” basis. From the list last time, I’ve added Presto Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. (Primephonic has merged into Apple, and I’ve omitted Qobuz.) I’ll also comment on various platforms that I haven’t included in the main comparative review.

Here’s the list:

All of Tidal, Idagio and Presto claim to remunerate artists more fairly than Spotify, Apple or Amazon.

A reminder before we start...

For classical listeners, the big issue is metadata: the format of the information your service keeps about each recording. The traditional format for streamed music metadata is “Artist, Album, Track”. If you are looking for “Taylor Swift, Midnights, Anti-Hero”, that works fine. But if you’re looking for Maria Callas’s 1955 recording of Bellini’s Norma at La Scala, or to pin down a specific recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor, Op.37,  “Artist, Album, Track” isn’t going to cut the mustard: the concerto has been recorded by over a hundred different pianists, orchestras and soloists in hundreds of combinations.

The selection process

I’m going to cover six questions that should help determine your choice.

  1. What music do you listen to?
  2. Is it compatible with your platform and any need for offline use?
  3. Does the audio quality meet your aspirations?
  4. How effectively can you find a selection of recordings for a given piece (and a recommendation, if available)?
  5. How easy is it to find a specific recording?
  6. Can it help you learn more about the music?

Question 1: what music do you listen to?


Assuming that you only want a single subscription:

If you can afford two subscriptions, a viable option is to have a subscription to Idagio or Presto for your classical needs, plus one to Amazon, Apple, Spotify or Tidal to use for other genres.

Question 2: is it compatible with your platform and any need for offline use?

You can use all of these services on iOS and Android phones and on your desktop browser, with one exception:

If you often use music when you’re out of range of decent Internet (e.g. on a plane or train) or if you’re worried about data plan usage, you’ll want to download tracks to your phone while you’re safely in WiFi range. This works on all six platforms, but Apple makes you jump through some hoops, switching between Apple Classical and Apple Music. The process is clunky, to say the least.

Idagio, Tidal and Spotify all have desktop apps (for MacOS and Windows). The others don’t. 

Question 3: does the audio quality meet your aspirations?

Several platforms offer different maximum quality levels for different recordings. I’ve just looked at one relatively recent recording (Rachmaninov 2 with Khatia Bhuniatishvili and the Czech Phil) across all the platforms to see what was on offer. 

“HiFi quality” is the quality you get from a CD – lossless compression at 16-bit resolution and 44.1kHz sample rate. “24-bit quality” is also lossless, at 24-bit resolution and 96 kHz or higher sample rate.

How much any of this matters to you is down to your ears and the quality of your listening equipment.

One complaint that has been made about streaming in the past concerns audible gaps between tracks. On the Krystian Zimerman recording of the Beethoven Emperor Concerto, the second movement runs into the third – you can hear the steady pp horn note and Zimerman’s breathing as he limbers up for the big theme of the rondo. 

I tried this transition out on all six services: all passed without a hitch, except Amazon and Spotify, where a clear break was audible.

Question 4: how effectively can you find a selection of recordings for a given piece (and a recommendation, if available)?

When finding out what’s available, Idagio on the desktop is the clear winner here. You can navigate to the work, showing significant details such as what language an opera is sung in, or whether the work is performed in a non-standard arrangement. The desktop platform provides a sidebar listing ensembles, conductors and musicians of various types. Idagio on the phone isn’t bad, but you’re missing that crucial sidebar.

Presto and Apple both perform perfectly well in giving you a variety of recordings for a given work. Idagio, Presto and Apple all had reasonable selections (Presto’s list was slightly shorter).

If, however, what you want is a recommendation, Idagio isn’t going to help; nor are Amazon, Spotify or Tidal, whose software isn’t even aware of what a “work” means in the first place.

The clear winner here is Presto, which flags recordings recommended in the press or in published guides. If a recording has been flagged, there’s a “reviews” section which shows you where it was recommended, with excerpts from what was said.

Apple gives you an “Editor’s choice” for the Mahler (Rattle/CBSO from 1987), but not for the others.

Search results on iPhone: from left, Idagio, Presto, Apple

Bear trap: vintage recordings

When surveying available recordings of a popular work, it can be frustrating to find the same recording showing up many times in the list – often with dates that cannot possibly be correct. For example, in the list for the Mahler Resurrection Symphony on Idagio, the Lorin Maazel recording with the Philharmonia shows up five times. The Bruno Walter recording shows up three times, two of them with the correct date of 1957, but the third dated 2020 (Walter died in 1962).

The most common reason for multiple appearances of the same recording is that the original has gone out of copyright, and other labels, who were uninvolved in the original recording, are happy to rebadge it and upload it to the streaming platforms. In doing so, labels are able to make money without the tedious business of actually recording a performance. This is an intractable problem for streaming platforms which, as far as I can tell, no one has attempted to solve.

Question 5: how easy is it to find a specific recording?

For all six platforms, typing “rigoletto sutherland macneil” into the search bar delivers the desired result. Presto is the best in that it’s the only result shown; Tidal is the worst in that it’s some way down the list of results, with several instances of the wrong Sutherland recording shown first.

For all six platforms, typing “boieldieu harp concerto zabaleta” into their search bar gave the right result in top position.

For all six platforms, typing “beethoven emperor concerto helmchen” into the search bar gave the desired result. Once again, Presto filtered out all the others. For Amazon, it came some way down.

In summary: this task can be accomplished fine on all six platforms by choosing the right thing to type into the search bar.

Question 6: can it help you learn more about the music?

Amazon and Spotify provide no added material that I can see.

Tidal’s “Explore” section provides playlists in many categories. To be honest, I need more than just a playlist to persuade me that something should leap to the top of my list of things to listen to.

Apple provide a large number of playlists in various categories: “Composer Essentials”, “Undiscovered”, “Hidden Gems” and so on. (I can’t honestly say that any of them interested me hugely.) Also included is editorial content, both text and audio, and Apple have recruited some big names to do it. These often seem quite shallow: having Yo-Yo Ma give 40 seconds worth of thoughts on Bach’s Cello Suite no. 2 didn’t really add much to my experience.

Idagio provides an extensive series of playlists which, at first glance, look considerably more appealing than Apple or Tidal’s. They’re still just playlists, but several of them did pique my interest.

Presto is the clear winner here again: their “Articles” section contains full length interviews which are far meatier, and their inclusion of liner notes for 70,000 of the albums makes it far more likely that I’m going to find information that’s new or useful to me.

Idagio “Discover”, Presto “Articles”, Apple “Listen Now”

Other platforms

In addition to these six platforms, there are a lot of alternatives around. Here are the ones I’ve come across, in alphabetical order.

Pricing

Here is the UK price for a basic single user monthly subscription. I’ve given a link to each platform’s full UK price list wherever I could find one: Amazon and Apple seem to be trying to hide theirs.

Amazon, Apple, and Presto are all £10.99 per month.

Spotify and Tidal are cheaper at £9.99.

Idagio is the cheapest at €9.99 (£8.73 at time of writing). Commendably, they are the only platform who don’t just change the dollar or Euro sign to a pound sign and leave the number unchanged, penalising UK customers by 25% compared to their US counterparts, or 15% compared to Europeans.

My choice: use two subscriptions

My circumstances: most of my listening is on a desktop computer; some is my car or via a Sonos box in my living room. I also listen to music while travelling, in which case I need it downloaded to my phone.

For the last year or so, I’ve been happily using Tidal and Idagio: Tidal for general listening and Idagio when I need to research available recordings or find a specific one. That choice is going to stay unchanged for now.

Apart from classical metadata, Tidal does everything I need and neither Spotify nor Amazon is going to displace it.

Presto is a close contender for replacing Idagio. At the end of the day, I value Idagio’s more detailed metadata-driven search more than Presto’s more attractive user interface and additional liner notes. But it was a very close call and I would be happy with either.

It would be nice to have a single subscription to replace both Tidal and Idagio, and that’s what Apple Classical provides. But for now, it doesn’t do what I want: the lack of a desktop player and the extremely clunky process for downloading classical albums for offline use mean that for me, at least, it’s not worth the financial saving of switching over.

Single subscription choices


[Update: 6-Apr-2023: Presto Music have informed me that they pay artists per second rather than per track. This is important because classical tracks are often longer than those in other genres, so I've added Presto to the list of services who are making an effort to be fairer.]

“the big issue is metadata... ‘Artist, Album, Track’ isn’t going to cut the mustard”