Real Rhapsody is a music subscription service that I have been using for quite a while now. It features millions of pop songs, jazz tunes, and classical works. The catalogue is pretty amazing, rarely do they not have what I am looking for. All it takes to listen to days of music is a broadband internet access, the rhapsody software, and a subscription plan for $10/month.

Most of the times I use rhapsody to listen to pop, jazz, or world music. Why? Because Rhapsody’s search engine is just not made for finding classical music. This is the one backdrop that most (all?) music subscription plans have: their search engines are not finding the classical music I am looking for. Here’s an example: Let’s say I want to listen to Brahms’ wonderful first piano trio in B-major. I type “Brahms piano trio no 1” into the search engine and it comes up with 72 hits, mostly piano trios by Brahms, some quartets, quintets, Schubert trios, etc… Also: the search results will list the track name, the artist, and the album title only. No performers, album labels, or date of recordings… The problem is also that the track name will be something like “Trio No. 1 in B-Major, 1st movement” or just “Allegro con brio”, or a combination of both. The artist will be either “Bamberger Symphoniker” or “Johannes Brahms” (in the case of which I am always so excited to find out that Brahms did record his own music). And album titles for classical music are especially revealing: “Piano Trios”, “Trios”, “Life and Works: Brahms, Schubert, Schumann”. Great!

Wouldn’t it be cool though, to search for “BWV 71” and get a page where there is a list of performers who recorded this cantata by Bach. You could then rearange the recordings according to performers’s names, label, date of recording, (or color of the cover ;-)) You would be able to compare performances, you could browse genres like “piano quartet” across composers from all times. Imagine that you could combine this sort of search engine with some service that gives you information about the pieces and performers. The possibilities are endless.

The problem is that the subscription services would have to restructure their databases in order to allow for good classical search engines. They probably think the investment is not worth it. They probably look at the number of people actually listening to classical music and say: see, only a few people are listening to our classical collection anyhow. They probably don’t realize that people don’t listen to classical music over their subscription plans because they cannot find what they are looking for! They probably don’t have a clue about how many people out there would be willing to pay substantially more than 10 bucks for the kind of service I outlined above.