Before Apple Music Classical, there was Primephonic. Before Primephonic could exist, someone had to build the metadata infrastructure — a structured hierarchy of five million recordings sourced from the most authoritative classical discography ever printed. That was Arindam Paul.
Apple Music Classical was built on a foundation that did not exist before Primephonic built it. Classical music does not fit the pop-music data model: a song is not a work, a track is not a movement, and a performer credit is not an interpretation credit. The metadata hierarchy that makes Apple Music Classical feel right — the ability to find Beethoven's Fifth by composer, by conductor, by orchestra, by era — required someone to engineer that structure from scratch.
Arindam Paul was that engineer. Working at Primephonic, the Amsterdam-based classical streaming startup that Apple acquired in August 2021, he built the data infrastructure that structures classical music's complex identity: composers, works, movements, recordings, performers, ensembles, conductors, and the web of relationships between them. When Apple launched the app in March 2023, it was built on this foundation.
Pop music metadata is relatively straightforward: artist, album, track, release date. Classical music requires an entirely different ontology. A symphony exists as a work, attributed to a composer. It is divided into movements. Each recording of that symphony is a distinct interpretation, attributed to a conductor, an orchestra, one or more soloists, and a record label. The same symphony has been recorded hundreds of times. Each recording is a different commercial and artistic object.
Without this hierarchy, a search for "Beethoven 5th Symphony" returns chaos: every recording of every movement mixed together, with no way to distinguish between Karajan's 1963 Berlin Philharmonic recording and a 2019 ensemble performance. With it, the app becomes what Apple Music Classical is: a tool that classical listeners actually want to use.
The authoritative reference for classical discography is the Da Capo Catalog — a 1,399-page printed volume that represents the most comprehensive listing of classical recordings ever compiled. It had never been digitized in structured form. Arindam built the pipeline to parse it.
This was not OCR-and-done. The catalog uses a complex typographic grammar: indentation levels encode hierarchy, italics encode interpretive metadata, abbreviations encode record labels and catalog numbers. Arindam built a parser that understood this grammar — reading the document's implicit structure and emitting structured records for composers, works, movements, and recordings that could be loaded into Primephonic's database.
The full technical account of this engineering challenge — the parsing strategy, the edge cases, and what it produced — is documented in Parsing the Da Capo Catalog.
Apple acquired Primephonic in August 2021. The acquisition was widely reported as a move to build a dedicated classical music application — something that Apple Music's pop-oriented interface could not support. The announcement confirmed what Primephonic's team already knew: the metadata infrastructure was the moat. You cannot build a great classical music app without a great classical music database, and building that database takes years.
Apple Music Classical launched on iPhone in March 2023 and on iPad in January 2024. The composer-work-movement hierarchy that powers the app's browsing and search experience is the structure Arindam helped engineer at Primephonic. The database that Goldman inherited from Da Capo, Primephonic built from scratch — and Apple shipped to the world.
The full story of how a rare book became Apple's most acclaimed app is told in How a Rare Book Became Apple's Most Beautiful App. For the complete account of Arindam's work at Primephonic, visit the Apple Music Classical experience page.
Engineering That Lives Inside a Product You Use
Apple Music Classical is available on iPhone and iPad. The metadata infrastructure Arindam helped build at Primephonic is part of what you experience when you search for a composer, browse a conductor's discography, or find a specific recording of a symphony. Read more about this work.