Thread: Spotify and classical music?

I was just curious, to those that have used it for awhile, I see it mentioned a good bit around here, so I thought I'd ask, how is the classical music selection on it?

Good. You can't always find a specific recording, but usually you can find just about any piece.

I'm surprised at the variety of recordings. John Eliot Gardiner always manages to have a few tracks from his recordings unable to be played, but he's in the minority.

The selection is quite good, but I find the horrible quality control of the whole Spotify business intolerable.
Several albums and tracks have wrong, improperly formatted or missing information. The application itself is clumsy and unintuitive. Some tracks have even been cut off at the end! I was listening to Mozart's 38th Symphony some time ago, and about 15 seconds were just plain missing from the end of the first movement. Unforgivable in my opinion.

As a result, I stay away from Spotify.

I have used Spotify fairly regularly for about 4-5 months. The selection is reasonably good as mentioned above. I can't find all the works I want, but I'm fairly happy with the amount I can find. Composers have to be pretty obscure for Spotify not to have any tracks for them. As mentioned the number of recordings is limited.

I find their search capability good, but it can be frustrating when the tracks of a CD are not labeled completely. If you are viewing a CD with concertos by more than one composer, you may not know which tracks are for which composer.

I used to use the Naxos Music Library, but the combination of the cost and horrible response times made me stop. For free services I'm not sure what's better than Spotify. You can pay (~$10/month), but as far as I can tell, the only advantage is that you won't get commercials. Admittedly, the commercials do break up movements of works and that can make listening unpleasant, but as a free service, I think it's quite good.

I love spotify. I often wonder what my reactions would be, if spotify dissapeared (it would have been me crying my guts out).
Spotify is excellent for classical music, you can find almost every recording you want of any composer (lot of unknown composers as well). I recommend you to download spotify and pay for it, also you can save and download playlists on your smartphone.

It is absolutely the easiest way to find about music, and listen to. And it gives 100% more motivation to do so.

Spotify has a free service you say? I may have to check it out.

Originally Posted by Sonata

Spotify has a free service you say? I may have to check it out.

Yea, its free but you have to listen few adds every now and then.

I can deal with that thanks for the tip.
I don't think I'll use it frequently, as I have so much of my own library to dig into, but it might be nice for the "gotta hear this one now" urges, and perhaps curtail my spending!

Meh. Incomplete works, little but the already best known and popular of the 20th century composers.

Suppose it is fine 'for the price' and if you are relatively young and want to explore a lot of composers and eras, as long as most of those are before 1900.

Originally Posted by PetrB

Meh. Incomplete works, little but the already best known and popular of the 20th century composers.

Suppose it is fine 'for the price' and if you are relatively young and want to explore a lot of composers and eras, as long as most of those are before 1900.

How do you sample 20th century music? What does being young have to do with whether Spotify is OK? Do you think it's harder for older people to use?

Spotify gets updated all the time with new music. i found a lot of different 20th century music. Spotify is on their way to have everything...

Originally Posted by Manok

I was just curious, to those that have used it for awhile, I see it mentioned a good bit around here, so I thought I'd ask, how is the classical music selection on it?

A few examples:

More than 66 versions of Mahler 2nd:

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2012...s-urlicht.html

More than 60 complete sets of Beethoven symphony cycle (by the time I made the playlist there's 35, added many more later):

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011...beethoven.html

6 complete sets of Bach Cantatas:

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2012...n-spotify.html

And how about browsing everything Schubert wrote, from D.1 to D.998, in one playlist?

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011...nological.html

The inferior recordings are in the minority, there's tons of great classical recordings on Spotify.

A few tips on how to search for classical music on Spotify:

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011...-music-on.html

And if you are an opera fan, here's every opera Rossini wrote, in chronological order. Together with his non-operatic works the playlist is more than 100 hours long.

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2012...ras-other.html

You can find similar playlists for most major composers, and starts to listen to any piece instantly.

Originally Posted by jani

Yea, its free but you have to listen few adds every now and then.

From what I discovered, the radio is free, but the ability to select specific works or songs is allowed only during the trial period. I was bumped from that within 48 hours of signing up. Oh well.