Classical music had a global market share in the music market around 5% in downloads, radio and CD sales. But in streaming, its share was (and is) only 1%. At the same time industry experts projected that by 2030 70% of global music revenue and consumption would be in streaming. The three concluded that classical music was facing an existential challenge: a genre that is enormously underrepresented in the dominant channel of the future does not have a bright future, to put it mildly. Declining income will reduce funding for talent and genre development, dramatically.

They did not wonder for long why classical is so underrepresented in streaming. As classical music lovers they all had the same disappointing (often even frustrating) experiences when streaming classical on major streaming services. In particular they shared frustrations on poor search results, recommendations that usually did not make a lot of sense, no availability of lossless audio quality, no interesting background information to enrich their classical experience, cumbersome functionality to listen to different recordings of the same work, and more.

They decided to investigate the matter. Soon they found out that generic streaming services have designed their metadata and search and recommendations algorithms based on pop music's structure: name of artist, name of album and name of song, and that's it. But classical music's structure has typically 8 parameters: Mozart's (1) Seventeenth (2) Piano (3) Concerto (4), the 'andante' movement (5), performed by Lang Lang (6) and the Wiener Philharmoniker (7), conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt (8). In other words, to solve the streaming pain points for classical listeners, fundamentally different metadata and algorithms are needed.