Apple Music has launched the world’s first weekly top 100 chart purely for classical music albums. Topping the list at launch is Bach’s Keyboard Concertos, with a mix of familiar names and more contemporary classical making up the rest of the chart. You can view the entire list here if you have the Classical app.
This is not an editorial list but a marker of popularity. Apple combines streaming and download data from Apple Music, iTunes, and Shazam to figure out what’s hot in the world of classical music. We’d expect the big names to be mainstays in the chart, but it will certainly be interesting to see how music from hundreds of years ago changes in popularity from week to week.
If you haven’t used it yet, Apple Music Classical is a standalone app for lovers of classical music, film scores, and more. Classical music is notoriously difficult to organize effectively, but Apple learned lessons from its acquisition of Primephonic and put effort into specialized search functions and human-curated playlists.
Despite being a separate app, it still runs off a normal Apple Music subscription – if you’ve already got one, you can use Classical for no extra cost. Read more about how Classical works in our complete overview.