# openclassical - a better way to browse classical music on YouTube



## DavidH (May 12, 2013)

Hi all. I'm a member of the openclassical team, and I wanted to share our project. The mission of openclassical is to categorize the history of classical music in a simple-to-navigate interface. So far we have listed the complete works of Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninoff so far, among others.

Best of all, for each work we query YouTube dynamically, then match, filter and sort the results, making it very easy to listen to works you already love, or discover new things.

Here's a link to our Beethoven page: https://www.openclassical.com/composer/Ludwig_van_Beethoven

All feedback is welcomed. Hope you enjoy!


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## Mika (Jul 24, 2009)

Good start. Post romantic is maybe too high level . You will split it into smaller pieces like 20th century, contemporary? Are you planning create some member pages to where you can mark maybe listened,collected works? Some spotify links coming also or you can add those to your own pages?


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## Feathers (Feb 18, 2013)

Great idea! I think it'll be a helpful tool for navigating through classical music on Youtube.  I like the way it is organized.


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## hreichgott (Dec 31, 2012)

This is a site that I'll probably use. 

Just out of curiosity how did you handle the quality control issue? My major problem with Youtube listening is that so many of the recordings I find at first are either the wrong piece or a bad recording or bad performance. I only listened to a couple of selections from your site but they were accurate and good quality, at least as good as one can expect from Flash video.
There is also a potential copyright problem of course but I assume you are simply punting that one on to Youtube...

I do think you should enable the "show minor composers" option by default. Disabling it by default makes it look like you have way fewer composers than you actually do. Then people who don't feel like scrolling through all the names could find the box and uncheck it if they want. 
I could scold about some of the people you consider minor, but I won't


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## Novelette (Dec 12, 2012)

Hopefully the lesser-known works will eventually be posted to YouTube itself. As it stands, there are a lot of missing links. But I realize that this is, as yet, an incomplete enterprise. I look forward to using it!


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## Marisol (May 25, 2013)

Great initiative!

Since you are asking for feedback:

1. Make the information accessible by an open API so that music managers and players can get info from it
2. Out of copyright works could have links to http://imslp.org/wiki/ for the score.
3. You provide links to performances on YouTube and to Amazon. That is great! But I believe you should be clear about your intentions, if you want to make money through referrals you should mention that and then I think the term "open" is not appropriate. If not then I would find "open" appropriate.

Note that in my opinion the copyright disclaimer is neither valid not necessary. It is not necessary because you do not store the media, it simply is a link to YouTube and you are not a streaming service or an online radio station, and it is not valid because the fair use allowance is very narrow and in my opinion not applicable here.


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## DavidH (May 12, 2013)

Thanks for the comments! Let me try to reply to each.

Mika - the post-romantic title has been a bit of a design challenge for us so far. It seems that once we enter post-1900, there are lots of different things happening, and it's hard to find big trends. I think because they also overlap with each other presentation becomes harder, especially with the non-classical-musician visitor in mind. Simpler headings certainly make things easier to grasp.

In future versions of the site we do hope to add more granularity to this, as we agree that this is needed. If you would like to suggest an approach we might take, we would appreciate it.

You mention membership. We have quite a few things planned out for the future, but with this in mind, what features do you think would be most useful to you? We have already thought of a 'bookmark' feature within the site itself, so a user might build a collection of works they like (at a higher level than a particular movie). We are also planning to add forums into the site at a very granular level.

Thanks for suggesting Spotify integration at some level - we will look into that.

Feathers - thanks for the kind words!

hreichgott - you touch on a couple very interesting points. Firstly, the quality of our results. I am so pleased you noticed this. We use the YouTube API, which is an automated process for querying YouTube results. We gather as much as we can from this API, then perform our own matching logic on the results, which includes various filters and sorting depending on the composer, and aspects of the work itself (such as genre). We actually end up throwing a lot of false-positives out. Best of all, our code tries to identify (rather, guess) the length of the complete work, and if it finds a good match, it pushes the results of around that length to the top of our list. As an example of this, we list nearly 100 complete recordings of Beethoven's 5th Symphony before incomplete results! Since this is done by code, it's awesome most of the time, but there are glitches here and there for the occasional work. We continue to tweak the code.

Copyright issues - you are correct. YouTube provides the movie info freely to us via its API, and none of the movies we embed originates from our site. In fact, movie embeds disappear from time to time on our site when the copyright owner requests them removed from YouTube.

Major / minor composers - as we are still populating composers with works, we don't want to show a ton of composer links on the front page that will only lead to an empty page. So for the time being (but only temporarily) we are showing composers who already have works added (at least Classical period onwards). In the next month or so, we expect that all composers who are considered major (for example Berlioz, currently hidden) will be populated with at least a Top 10 and will be present on our front page, and the timeline. In the future there may be more distinctions than just major / minor, time will tell. We will see how people use the site, and what they like & don't like.

Novelette - thanks! We are hoping to have all major composers listed & populated with at least a Top 10 in the next month. We are finding that even this is a huge project! After this point we will be going deeper into each composer, one at a time.

Marisol - thank you also! Yes all feedback is much valued.

Our philosophy behind using the word "open" is intended to suggest clarity and simplicity, rather than "open-source" as a software idiom, which I think is where you're coming from. Yes, we do get referral fees for the Amazon links, but we certainly don't force users to do this. We are planning to release some additional premium features later this year aimed at music teachers and students, but the rest of the site will always remain free to use and explore.

I will think further on your comment - we had not considered that perspective.

To your specific points:
1. At some point in the future I think this would be a great idea on many levels, but probably won't be for a while.
2. We already do this for works which have scores at IMSLP. This is listed under the "Music Score" sub-header for each work.
3. As discussed above.

Thanks again all,

-David


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## Marisol (May 25, 2013)

DavidH said:


> 2. We already do this for works which have scores at IMSLP. This is listed under the "Music Score" sub-header for each work.


You are correct, I missed that looking at it the first time.


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## Mika (Jul 24, 2009)

In talk classical project we use this kind grouping for works:

Medieval (-1400) 
Renaissance (1400-1600)
Baroque (1600-1750)
Classical (1750-1820)
Romantic (1820-1900)
20th century (1900-1975)
Contemporary (1975-present)

Sometimes grouping is not clear between 20th century and Contemporary. Maybe putting work to two groups or use some kind of tagging will solve the problem. When it comes to member pages I find 'own collection' feature useful. If you have thousands of works bookmarking might not be the optimal solution. Bookmarking outside youtube (spotify etc.) would be great. I would also like give some additional info to my collection items liked 'Listened'. Personal tags and sorting based on them maybe solve this request.


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## hreichgott (Dec 31, 2012)

I don't think there's anything wrong with an arbitrary dividing line. Composers of other eras overlap too(Schubert) and we just have to pick one side or the other for them. IMSLP sets the dividing line at 1950, by the piece though not by the composer, so perhaps you could pick a birthdate year instead, maybe b. 1930 or later for late 20th-21st c. Just so long as we're not putting Debussy and current composers in the same period!


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## apricissimus (May 15, 2013)

@DavidH

I've been using openclassical most of the day at work. I think it's a great idea. I like the interface. It's intuitive and easy to use.

I have one suggestion: I noticed that one of Beethoven's early WoO has no Youtube video (WoO 47). It would be helpful if works with no videos had some indication of such in the list of works for a composer, instead of having to find that out by clicking on the link and being taken to a different page with the bad news. Maybe if the row in the table was grayed out? Or the font grayed out?


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## DavidH (May 12, 2013)

Mika - thanks for the comments! We will continue to think further about breaking post-romantic up a bit, I do agree with you. Hopefully we can find a way that most musicians will agree with, and that most non-musicians will easily grasp!

I also really like your suggestions for user features. This will be coming at some point in the future, so likely I will post here again with regard to that, so that some may even sign up for beta testing of what we build, if they would like. I'll keep you posted.

hreichgott - yes some composers should not be in the same category! Well pointed out.

apricissimus - thanks for the kind words! You know, in the last build of the site we actually had a column called 'Movies' on the 'All Works' table, which listed the number of YouTube movies for each work. However we found that visitors were a little confused by what it meant, and even why it was necessary, so we took it out. I do see the issue, where having this information somehow would make for a better browsing experience.

I like the idea of a color differentiation depending on the number of movies we have found, and you've given me a few other ideas as well. Let me take some time to think about this. Thanks again.

-David


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

Great initiative. I've long had a similar idea to make a "youtube portal" site dedicated to piano music. But yea, if I had the time...


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## Stargazer (Nov 9, 2011)

You.....are....my.....HERO! I think I'm in love!

I haven't looked around the site much, but I was really impressed with the little I did see.


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## CypressWillow (Apr 2, 2013)

In a word: Yes! Great concept, well executed. Thanks for this.


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## chrisco97 (May 22, 2013)

This site is awesome! It is very nicely laid out and is a fantastic idea. I look forward to seeing it progress!


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## DavidH (May 12, 2013)

DeepR, Stargazer, CypressWillow, chrisco97 - thanks!


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