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Primephonic offers two subscriptions: Premium and Platinum. Premium is MP3, 320kbps sound quality, Platinum promises 24bits lossless FLAC streams. For Premium you pay € 7.99 per month or € 79.99 per year, Platinum costs € 14.99 per month or € 149.99 per year. There is an app available for iOS and for Android. On a computer or laptop, you listen via a browser; a desktop app is in the making.
Hello, is it Debussy you’re looking for?
A frequently mentioned feature of streaming services is curatorship; a service where we are helped in discovering new music. Tidal and Spotify do this mainly by offering interesting playlists compiled by authoritative music connoisseurs. Primephonic also offers playlists and have a pleasant sense of humour by labeling them hipster-like, like there are playlists for ‘Workouts’ or ‘Ludwig Says Relax/Chill’. We particularly notice the communication via email that we receive with some regularity after registration. We are reminded in a pleasant tone of the search possibilities of Primephonic and of the richness of the catalogue (160 performances of the Hohe Messe by J.S. Bach, to name but a few). Also interesting is that there are in-house interviews with/about composers and musicians. At the time of writing we only see interviews with the composer Eric Whitacre and cellist Matthew Barley, but this is a nice initiative. Primephonic’s tone of voice reminds us a bit of Native DSD, Jared Sacks’ DSD platform (also from the Netherlands).
In practice
The welcome screen is simple and clear. We see a slideshow with new releases, playlists per artist, composer, country, instrument and for lovers of choral music a selection from medieval/renaissance to modern. Also nice is an ‘Essential playlist’, a kind of musical guide in classical music. Click on Symphonic and you have a choice of orchestral works from Mozart to Copland and Górecki. The app works more or less the same, where the layout is of course adapted to the size of a phone screen. In both cases it works quickly and easily. Searching is also fast (depending on your internet speed). On the app we can also adjust the sound quality and data size. It’s nice if you have a data limit. And we can create playlists that we can play offline.
It’s all easy and intuitive at Primephonic and that’s how it should be. Music apps should be responsive and fast. It does what it’s supposed to do and then focuses on classical music. It is a relief to look for and find music with ‘classical glasses’. Primephonic’s catalogue is extensive (more than 1 million titles, according to their own words). We search on known and more obscure albums and are not disappointed in the collection. Also nice that there is attention for contemporary classical music, young composers and performers. Of course you can always do more and better, but it’s mainly smaller labels that specialize in modern music and as a streaming service you have to conclude contracts with them.
