Dan Meier explains everything that's wrong with classical music streaming

Organizing recordings into a functional library is difficult. I remember noticing that WCRB-FM (outside of Boston) organized their LPs by record label and by the number on the label. That was in the 1970s when there were relatively few record labels around. I maintained a record library when I worked at WEIU-FM, and I had to expand it to include CDs, which required a lot of thought.

Fortunately I was only responsible for organizing the "classical" music. Recordings that were not "classical" fell under genres that were often student-generated. And new "genres" of music were being coined right and left. The "artist" was always singular. Jazz was divided into all sorts of categories, none of which made complete sense to me.

When iTunes came out with its fields to classify music, the organizing system look like something created by former college radio DJs. When I noticed that there wasn't a field for "composer," I smelled trouble.

Dan Meier has a piece on Medium that follows that smell, and leads us into the woes of trying to learn more about "classical" music through the devices that claim to make all things possible.

You can find it here.