I don't know what OP's business model looked like exactly. However, classical music is often composed and performed as full works, such as symphonies, operas, and concertos, rather than individual songs or tracks. These works are often intended to be listened to in their entirety and are structured in a way that builds upon and develops themes throughout the piece.

Another problem is that the way classical music is divided into tracks is sometimes not universal. For example, there are some recordings of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 that are divided into five separate tracks (one for each movement) while others divide it into just two tracks (one for the first three movements and another for the final two movements).

While there are many modern music albums that were intended to be listened to as full albums (e.g. "The Wall", "American Idiot" or "To Pimp a Butterfly"), I guess the track-based listening experience just won over in that part of the music world. That said, people often also just listen to a single sonata, aria, etc. in classical music too, of course, instead of always going for the 2 hour experience.

Listening to a Missa Solemnis that's broken up into about 5 tracks per movement.

There are gaps between the tracks.

Sigh. Gapless playback should be a hard default.

Although in many cases the album experience is annoying, eg a violin concerto followed by a couple of short pieces to fill time. I don’t usually want to listen to all of them and end up making playlists to separate them again.

Classical works very often come as a whole, with 3-4 particular "tracks" marking parts of that whole. It would be like selling a books by chapter.

OTOH maybe it would work. The Moonlight sonata underwent this, and the first track of the album is well-known and iconic, the third track is also widely recognized, but the second track is much more obscure.

Mostly what pell said.

The idea was to make the product "the album" again. In the past, the buying experience of a physical product was important to make it a powerful and personal experience: you had nice artwork, leaflet with information about the music you bought, bio of the performers etc. I wanted to try to recover some of that.

Given the enduring niche of physical media, why would a person choose non physical media for the artwork and leaflet experience? Would there be a UI that afforded the user thumbing through stacks, sliding the carton out, admiring the art as it is opened and an artifact unsleeved to be mated to a player?

I suppose something like that would be possible with NFC (with write durability improvements). The NFC holds a token allowing for the play of a particular album. For each non-cached play, a new token is generated and sent to the NFC. The album represented by the NFC can then be loaned or resold like the old way of physical media. Maybe even let the NFCs go bad after a few thousand token rewrites just like how vinyl and tapes wear out. It would have no improvement over old media other than having a large and fragile IT infrastructure.

Vinyl record sales outperformed CDs in the US for the first time since 1987, according to a new report. Just over 41 million vinyl records were sold in 2022, to the tune of $1.2bn (£.99bn). Only 33 million CDs were sold, amounting to $483m.

https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126.amp

One of the plan was to offer a bundled experience to the labels: you sell a physical media and the customer gets a code to add the album to their streaming library so they can also consume it digitally.

Edit/PS: It really feels strange arguing for an idea, I've given up on so long ago...

To think of a totally different possible trajectory of a technology is a bit like reading counterhistorical fiction. The interesting part isn’t just the assertion of something different but in considering the various second order effects.

Honestly, this is a lot of what I like about bandcamp. (I really hope that epic buying them isn't a bad sign, on that note...)

It's nice to get a cd or a cassette, with some fancy holofoil cover on it, a little artifact of a band I like, and still have it on my phone, in my browser, whenever I want to listen to it. I could dig out the actual equipment to play those things directly, but usually that's a pain, and I just want to have them as a totem or something.