It’s never been a better time to be a Classical music fan! For starters, in March of this year, Apple launched a new Classical-focused music streaming app. The app, Apple Music Classical, is separate from their flagship platform Apple Music, and is included within the same subscription service. For anyone unfamiliar, what makes this new app so unique (and necessary) is its use of music metadata.
As any Classical music fan can tell you, it can be notoriously difficult to find precisely what you’re looking for on streaming platforms because there are a lot of factors to consider when searching for a piece of music including: composer; ensemble; soloists; conductor; and more. Despite those challenges, the Classical music genre has been growing recently in weekly streams and outpaced the US Total Industry On-Demand Audio streaming growth in 2022 (13.4% and 12.2% YOY 2022 vs 2021, respectively).
The conventional wisdom is that Classical music fans tend to be older (which is true – the largest age cohort of Classical fans is 65+ at 22%), but what might be less apparent is that Classical music fans are adept streamers. Classical fans of the Baby Boomer generation, for example, are 24% more likely to use a music streaming service than Baby Boomer Country music fans and nearly 10% more likely to stream than Baby Boomer Pop music fans. And they are also willing to spend, as on average, Classical music fans spend 34% more per month on music compared to the average US listener.
Eighty-percent of Classical music fans say a music streaming service’s music library is either extremely or somewhat important when choosing a service. Given this audience averages 56 hours of music listening per month, which is three hours more than the average music listener, the service’s library is of the utmost importance.
Source:
US Music 360 2021-2023 YTD
