I know, classical music is a small share of the overall music market. But it’s still an important part of the overall music landscape, and if there are currently 36 million Apple Music subscribers, that means there are at least a couple of million people who listen to classical music.
Yet you cannot search for composers.
You see some composers listed as “artists,” you see their names in the titles of albums (for a number of years, many if not most classical albums that feature music from a single composer have that composer’s name at the beginning of the title), you may see playlists with a composer’s music, you even see “songs,” but you cannot see all the music by a composer.
Granted, this could return a lot of results. Maybe not for Olivier Messiaen, as in the example above, but for a composer like Beethoven, Bach, or Brahms, there would be thousands of albums.
Yet if I search for Beethoven, and look at the album results – which only features albums that contain his name in the title – only 21 albums are shown; including With the Beatles, because it contains their cover of Roll Over Beethoven.
This lack of searchability borders on contempt. Apple Music wants you to be able to “discover” music, but they don’t give you the tools to search for anything. You can only really discover music in the For You section, or in playlists. And it’s not just for classical music; I’d like to have better search for jazz as well, looking for specific musicians.
Apple has the metadata; they just don’t let customers access it. Because they don’t care very much about music that isn’t pop and hip-hop. People at Apple have told me that there are employees who listen to classical music who work in and around iTunes and Apple Music, and this has lead to some improvements in the way classical music can be organized in an iTunes library, and to the way some composer names are displayed in the iTunes Store and in Apple Music. It wouldn’t be hard to introduce this type of search; in fact, they used to have a “Power Search,” that had fields like Composer, Director (for movies), Author (for books), and more. But they just don’t care.