William Gallagher
It's still not rolled out to all Apple devices, but now subscribers to Apple Music Classical can listen online.
If it seemed a very long time between Apple buying Primephonic and finally releasing it as Apple Music Classical for the iPhone, it's now been about as long again. And still, the service is limited to just a few devices — but now its full catalog is available through a web browser.
Apple Music Classical is available online at classical.music.apple.com, and subscribers can log in to listen. New users are prompted to try a one-month free trial.
During initial AppleInsider testing, some tracks took an unusually long time to start, or in a couple places actually failed to begin. Then, too, users can't navigate away to other sections of Apple Music Classical without the current track stopping.
But being online means that, in effect, Apple has finally brought Apple Music Classical to the Mac. It isn't a native app, but being available on the Mac via a browser means that now only Apple TV 4K lacks any kind of Apple Music Classical app.
It took Apple more than a year and a half to launch Apple Music Classical, and at the time it was solely on the iPhone. Two months later in May 2023, it launched on Android.
Apple only brought it to the iPad in November 2023, and that was the last device to get it. Unless you count the Apple Vision Pro, which lets users use the Apple Music Classical iPad app.
There has been one more outlet for the service before it became a web app, though. In November 2024, Apple Music Classical became available through CarPlay.
It's hard to understand why the rollout of Apple Music Classical has taken so long, and why the Mac, Apple TV 4K, and Apple Vision Pro don't have native apps. It's especially peculiar because each of these devices does have a native Apple Music app.
Apple Music Classical is a subset of Apple Music, even though Apple treats it as a separate app or service. Subscribing to it means subscribing to Apple Music, although there are often extended free trials.
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Malcolm Owen
Charles Martin
Stephen Silver
Christine McKee
7 Comments
Well, this is a profoundly odd choice on Apple's part. Why would they go to the trouble of making Apple Classical Music available via a web browser, but not natively on a mac or on AppleTV? There's a considerable overlap on a Venn Diagram of audiophiles and classical music listeners. What that means is that a lot of classical music listeners have fancy amplifiers and speakers in their listening room, and they're most likely going to have a Mac or an Apple TV hooked up for listening to Apple music content. In my case, it's an Apple TV. I can listen to century-old 78 rpm shellac records and then switch over to listen to high-resolution, lossless Dolby Atmos streaming content, but I can't do it natively from an Apple Classical Music app.
It's a "first world problem" to have to use an iPhone or iPad to browse or search the classical music app and save it to my library so I can then pull it up in the standard music app on the AppleTV in order to listen to it on the fancy sound system. If that's the worst thing that happens to me all day, then it's a good day.
Still, it's a workaround. I don't know about you, but I left the Windows world behind because I don't like workarounds. It should just work. The back-end for Apple Classical is there. After all this time, what could the difficulty possibly be to creating an AppleTV app to access it? If anything, that ought to be simpler to make than this web browser interface.
I'm usually the one on here who can find a logic and make an argument for why Apple has chosen to do or not do something a certain way. In this case, I can't figure it.
The web seems like the logical place to go first. Literally everything can access it -including Macs.
I never said that there shouldn't be native apps on all of Apple's platforms. But clearly someone at Apple decided to deprioritize native Mac and Apple TV apps. And guess what? We are not going to learn the reasoning for this delay. Who knows? Maybe the software engineer who would be working on these is on sabbatical, maternity leave, whatever.
Most likely they will get around to it at some point.
Be grateful the classical music service is accessible by web browser.
Note that the same cannot be said for Apple Maps after all these years which will always stunt adoption by third parties.