Read all about The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music:

Apple, which long paid classical more mind than other big tech companies, debuted Apple Music with dismal classical options, as NPR’s Anastasia Tsiouclas and The New Yorker’s Alex Ross have documented.

And even beyond the streaming service, the new version of Apple’s signature music software seems especially broken. In the name of creating a “complete thought around music,” iTunes 12 has crammed a streaming service and a media library and a recommendation service and a file store and a device manager into one interface. The sum is that nothing “just works”—and MP3s especially don’t work well.

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Apple has already discontinued its iPod Classic, the last media player that could conceivably let you tote around your entire music library in one device. The company is floating to a streaming model.

If classical listeners are ill-served by streaming services, though, they will stick with music files; and that means they represent, as a bloc, the set of listeners who will continue to maintain personal libraries of owned music even as the larger public rents their digital music instead.

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The CDDB is the database which iTunes used to detect what was on a CD while ripping it.

Classical is not the only genre that works poorly with this tagging system, said Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format, a history and meditation on the technology. Audiobooks, lectures, and sound art don’t really adapt well either.

If anything, said Sterne, the long-playing record and the compact disc—the two great audio formats of the late 20th century—might have been special cases.

With both the CD and the LP, he said, “it just so happened that things that were of interest to the broader world of people who made recorded media, and people who were in the music industry, lined up with those of classical performers and audiences.”

Analogously, perhaps the technology for prog also peaked with the gatefold LP?

Or with the 70-minute epic prog CD that had a fold-out booklet with liner notes and poster?