Web music services put off classical lovers

Fire up the Spotify player, type in the name of an artist, album or song, and presto. Select a track and hit play: the music streams instantly. Sound quality, though not equivalent to a CD’s, is acceptable for casual listening if you use the company’s ad-supported free service, and considerably better if you opt for a premium subscription.

But what if those bulging CD shelves and closets full of LPs from which you yearn to be unshackled are filled with symphonies, sonatas and operas? Will Spotify fulfill an aficionado’s fondest desires?

Classical-music lovers have been conspicuously absent from the general hullabaloo that has greeted Spotify’s arrival on these shores — this despite an uncontestable cornucopia of classical recordings available through the service.

Finding classical music on Spotify is easy; finding a specific recording, on the other hand, can feel like anything but. As always seems to be the case, classical buffs have to work harder than pop-music fans to build and organise the virtual library of their dreams.

The problem, as usual, comes down to data, specifically, metadata, the information that tells a computerised player what content the files on a compact disc contain and how to organise tracks you’ve downloaded from the Internet. When you pop a CD into your computer, your music player displays metadata associated with the files on the disc: usually the artist, the album title, the track titles, the date of issue and not much else.

That’s straightforward enough when you’re dealing with pop music, where songs are the lingua franca. But as anyone who has ever browsed through classical recordings on the iTunes Music Store knows, it can be daunting to locate and compare specific recordings of common works like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” And the results can be muddled; is the “artist” Beethoven, the orchestra, the conductor or some combination? As yet, no standard for classical metadata exists.

Like most of the business models that have arisen since music first started migrating to the Internet, Spotify and its competitors work from a pop-music mind-set, as do most of the record companies that provide it with music and metadata. The results are baffling searches and chaotic returns.

When I was recently assigned to review a weekend of concerts at the Bard Music Festival, I decided to compile a Spotify playlist of pieces that I would be hearing that weekend.

A search for “Sibelius,” the composer central to this year’s programming, brought up 10 recommended artists, two of whom appeared to be the composer in question. Others included “Sibelius Finlandia (Best Of),” the Jean Sibelius Quartet and Orval Carlos Sibelius, a quirky French alt-pop artist I’m glad to have discovered inadvertently.

If you can resign yourself to the effort involved in rooting out the recordings you want — which isn’t so different from scouring through secondhand record stores looking for specific gems and finding unexpected treasures along the way — then Spotify quickly becomes addictive.

The social aspects of Spotify and similar services further enrich the user experience. Seeking diversion from work one recent evening, I quickly assembled a playlist featuring my favorite recordings of music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, then sent out a link on Twitter.

Within a few days, six other Spotify users had subscribed to my list, meaning that they clicked on a button to make my list part of their own virtual libraries. Not a large number, but it was enough to persuade me that a Michael Tippett playlist might also be welcome. (No takers so far.)

Wait, to purchase — as in, buying a CD? Well, yes. Along with the clear benefits of Spotify come a number of inescapable drawbacks. The biggest, and the one likeliest to cause ire among classical-music listeners, is Spotify’s lack of seamless playback, resulting in brief but audible gaps between tracks meant to flow together smoothly.

Listening one recent afternoon to a riveting account of Wagner’s “Walküre” with the great tenor Jon Vickers, which I’d synced to my iPhone for offline listening in less than five minutes, those tiny gaps between the tracks repeatedly jolted me out of the unfolding drama. Until complete operas can stream without stuttering, cognoscenti likely will shun the service.

A still greater drawback is the threat of an artist or record company withdrawing from Spotify altogether, as Brian Brandt, the owner of the contemporary-classical label Mode Records, mused about doing in an essay posted on the Webzine NewMusicBox. The royalty Brandt receives for each stream of a Mode recording — about one-third of a cent per stream, by his estimation — was insufficient compensation for the potential loss of CD sales that might result from having those recordings available for unlimited streaming.

While artists and other labels have expressed the view that increased visibility on platforms like Spotify will bolster careers by promoting awareness, Brandt is not alone in voicing serious reservations. For convenience and the potential for discovery, I will happily use Spotify or a similar service daily. But I won’t be giving up my CDs and LPs just yet.