Guest
Simon M. Eder
Simon M. Eder is Co-founder at Primephonic, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Simon M. Eder, co-founder of Primephonic, explains how solving classical music's metadata problem led Apple to acquire his startup as Apple Music Classical.
Questions these episodes answer
Why did Apple launch Apple Music Classical as a separate app instead of folding it into Apple Music?
Eder says the core difference was not the catalog, since Apple already had access to classical recordings, but how Primephonic handled metadata and search for classical listeners specifically, treating recordings as cover versions grouped into full works and movements rather than generic tracks.
Why is a standard per-stream payout unfair to classical music?
Eder explains a classical track can run up to 15 minutes and still gets paid the same as a three-minute pop track, so a 60-minute classical album might be only three tracks while a non-classical album of the same length is nine, paying out far less under a per-stream model. Primephonic introduced a per-second payout to fix this.
Why was it hard to get major labels to license music into a classical-only streaming service?
Eder says licensing only part of a major label's catalog into a niche, classical-only streaming product was a completely new kind of deal that had not been tried before, on top of needing the entire classical catalog on board so listeners could actually find every recording of a given work.
How did the Apple acquisition of Primephonic actually come about?
Eder says he and a colleague had once joked, years earlier over drinks in New York, about being acquired by Apple one day and only half-seriously wrote it in a calendar. Apple's actual first contact came unprompted, about eight weeks into the pandemic, and was followed by a long, uncertain negotiation before the deal closed.
What did Simon Eder do after Primephonic was acquired by Apple?
Eder kept running Pentatone, the original label, for a while, then joined an artist management agency for about a year and a half, traveled through Asia, and has since co-founded another startup while also opening a bar in Vienna, saying the acquisition gave him financial security rather than an overnight transformation.