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THE BOTTOM LINE The classical streaming platform Idagio says
its app has been downloaded 1 million times, but it won’t say how
many people pay the $9.99 monthly fee for full access.Idagio streams classical music, from Gregorian
chants to the minimalist movements of Philip
Glass. While the genre accounts for just 5% of the
recorded music market, listeners tend to be affluent
and loyal. But it requires an organizing structure
unlike that of popular music, which is easily sorted
by song, album, and artist. The classical catalog
resembles a long list of cover tunes, with multiple
orchestras performing the same pieces—something
akin to countless, nearly identical recordings of
every Beatles or Elvis song.
With so many versions of most compositions,
consumers will search for Tchaikovsky using dif-
ferent metrics than they would for Taylor Swift: a
specific orchestra or conductor, a long-forgotten
recording, a favorite soloist. And the fan base
might easily distinguish adagio from andante but
is often clueless when it comes to apps and smart-
phones. “Our typical user will be somebody who
asked his grandchildren to move his CD collection
onto a hard drive,” says Till Janczukowicz, who
co-founded Idagio in 2015 after two decades man-
aging classical musicians.
In the casual environment of Berlin’s startup
scene, Janczukowicz stands out with his slicked-
back salt-and-pepper hair (vaguely reminiscent
of Beethoven’s), polished Oxford brogues, gold
wristwatch, and pocket square billowing from his
blue blazer. Because of his decades working along-
side musicians and orchestras, he says he wants
to give artists a substantial share of the spoils—
something many pop performers say streaming
platforms don’t provide. So in contrast to the likes
of Spotify, which registers a song as streamed only
after 45 seconds, Idagio pays for every second a
piece of music is transmitted.
Janczukowicz says his aha! moment came a
few years ago in Salzburg, Austria, when he saw a
man awkwardly pasting up posters for a classical
concert—evidence that the industry had become out-
dated in reaching its target audience. In 2014 he sold
his flat to fund his idea, then brought on Christoph
Lange, a Berlin entrepreneur and digital savant
who’d created a German streaming company that
went bust. The pair spent a year looking for back-
ers before persuading Australia’s Macquarie Group
to put up some cash. After a second funding round
that netted $25 million, the founders hold just over
10% of the shares. “Classical is a part of the market
that big players struggle to adequately address,” says
Jochen Gutbrod, a partner at Berlin venture capital
firm Btov Partners AG, an early investor. “If you can
own this niche, it has great potential, because the
genre resonates globally.”
Today Idagio has about 90 employees at itsheadquarters along a Berlin canal and a small
outpost in Bratislava, Slovakia. The team has gath-
ered tracks from 1,000 labels, manually writing in
data like composer, soloist, instruments, conductor,
and studio or live. It now has more than 1.2 million
recordings from 2,500 orchestras, 6,500 conductors,
and 60,000 solo artists—all delivered in CD qual-
ity, the most complete collection of classical music
offered for streaming. The service became available
in the U.S. last year, and it’s increasingly popular in
Japan, South Korea, Latin America, and other places
where appreciating classical music is considered a
hallmark of distinction by a growing middle class
grasping for emblems of high culture.
The Idagio dashboard includes what the company
calls a mood wheel that lets users pick modes rang-
ing from optimistic (Brahms’s Symphony No. 1) to
tragic (Mahler’s Seventh) to passionate (Schumann’s
Violin Sonata No. 2). The next challenge is creating a
more immersive experience, with playlists curated
by artists and critics, and video clips of musicians
sharing stories of memorable recordings. “Classical
musicians today need to be communicators if they
want to remain relevant,” Janczukowicz says.
The app is still losing money, and the company
is tiny when compared with the industry’s leaders.
Janczukowicz says Idagio has been downloaded
more than 1 million times, though he declines to
say how many people pay the $9.99 monthly fee
for full access. Spotify, by contrast, just hit 100 mil-
lion paid subscribers. He’s not the only player in
the field: A U.S.-Dutch rival called Primephonic
was founded in 2017. And while symphony orches-
tras are mushrooming in China, many are wilting in
places such as the U.S. and Germany. “The market
needs a good classical music app, because neither
Spotify nor Apple can credibly claim to serve that
audience,” says Alice Enders, research director at
media consultant Enders Analysis Ltd. “The chal-
lenge for Idagio is to convert the CD people, who are
often very attached to their libraries.”
Janczukowicz says he doesn’t have an exit strat-
egy and that the focus for the next few years is to
enrich the platform: more podcasts, live sessions
at Idagio’s Berlin loft, and working with promoters
to quickly release recordings of concerts. Still, he
admits it won’t be easy as a niche player with lim-
ited resources. “There’s a lot we want to achieve,
but you can’t do it all overnight,” he says. “We have
25 engineers for the entire service. Spotify has 200
just for iOS. That gives you a sense of what we’re up
against.” —Benedikt Kammel○ Janczukowicz TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek May 27, 2019