Apple announces new standalone app for those with a "highbrow" taste in music

Originally rumored to arrive last year, Apple today introduced its Apple Music Classical app that will be available at no additional cost to Apple Music subscribers starting on March 28th. Apple claims that the app has the largest classical music catalog with over 5 million unique tracks and thousands of exclusive albums available at launch. Apple says that the app will allow users to "search by composer, work, conductor, or even catalog number."

Apple Music Classic will feature a specialized search engine created specifically for classical music, and Apple says the app will have the highest audio quality available (up to 192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless). The tech giant also says that users will be able to listen to their favorite classical music in spatial audio (surround sound) with no ads. And for those just getting introduced to the genre, the app includes "hundreds of Essentials playlists, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, and intuitive browsing features."

The app requires an Apple Music subscription (Individual, Student, Family, or Apple One), and the Apple Music Classical app is not available to those with an Apple Music Voice Plan. The app is not available in a few countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Also, your device must be running iOS 15.4 and later and you must have a connection to the internet.

In August 2021, Apple acquired classical music streamer Primephonic and the plan all along was to create a standalone app for classical music. You might recall that the largest transaction ever made by Apple was its $3 billion purchase of Beats Audio in 2014. Included in that transaction was the Beats Music streaming service which had just 111,000 paid subscribers at the time of the purchase. That was turned into Apple Music which had 88 million subscribers as of last summer.

Apple did say that an Android version of the Apple Music Classical app will be "coming soon." The Apple Music app is available from the App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android.