The world is s***y place. Sorry the music industry didn’t get to stay at its late 90s peak forever. Music industry revenues have actually been growing in recent years, and most of that revenue comes from streaming. If we could un-invent the Internet, video games, and Netflix, perhaps everyone would buy lots of CDs and the music industry would be king of the hill again. But we can’t, so let’s deal with the world we live in.
Reality is reality, and thing continue to degrade, but I no longer feel like 60 minutes of redbook audio is a premium product.
I've tried, believe me. I mean, maybe a tiny bit more air or ambience or whatever, but it's not like, a significant difference considering the file size discrepancies. I don't think I'd pass a blind listening test with 99% of the stuff I listen to. It blows my mind people want to go back to the 90's. Like, remember going to a store, paying $16.99 for an album without knowing whether or not it was going to be good...then finding out months later there's a "special edition" that came out 6 months after the initial release, and another version with a Japanese bonus track that your local shop wants $35 for. (I'm thinking about my experiences with Def Leppard's Slang, but certainly dozens and dozens of other albums I had and loved during my CD days. Don't miss it at. all.) Good riddance.
I've been using Tidal (hi quality streaming) + Roon (player) for the last few months. Spotify moving to CD quality streaming is great news, as I prefer their catalog over the Tidal catalog. But I prefer the Roon player over the Spotify UI, as it both a great music player that controls my local library, my steaming service, and my devices, as well as intelligent music information service, showing all the various links bnetween artists, albums, styles, etc. A great way to explore music and play music. Sadly Roon doesn't support Spotify yet (and also sadly is a paid subscription service that costs as much as a streaming service). So ... Spotify moving to lossless ... yay! Hopefully there'll be Roon support later, too. --Geoff
The next step up would be being able to stream surround mixes. But 16/44 is fine with me. It's like TV...I know there's 4K Netflix now and all that, but my normal 1080p stuff looks fine to me. (Admittedly the quality difference as you go up the video scale is much more obvious than audio) 16/44 should be the "normal" product, and I honestly think it's heading that way in due time. It was fine for 20 years of CD's and no one complained. But there's still multiple higher-res streaming options for those who can hear the difference.
I'm not asking you to do anything. I just think it's wholly inaccurate to accuse the company of expropriating anyone's rights. That's just not true.
Honestly, it's hard to me to tell from a 320 kbps mp3 file and a lossless one. Nevertheless, it's good news.
What I don’t miss about the 90s and early 2000s: driving an hour or more to the nearest big city to go to Tower Records and buy import copies of “CD1” and “CD2” of the latest British CD single from one of my favorite artists, at $8 to $12 a pop, to get the exclusive b-sides on each version of the single. I’ll take the Spotify world we live in today, thank you very much.
Oh, I'll pay for 16/44.1, if it's all there is. For streaming, it's de minimus. (And my TV at home tops out at 720p, so there you go....)
I’ll stick with Tidal. It works seamlessly to have 1 account on multiple devices where you need to login and out with Spotify with different devices.
Yup. I used to make a living writing columns -- back of the book magazine columns (back of the book? magazine? people don't even know what that is anymore), even in the early days online columns. I used to be able to make a living doing that. I used to be able to make a living in the newspaper business -- back when newspapers were full of entire sections of job classifieds and real estate listings and department store display ads before the internet took all that classified listings business away. Can't do it anymore. That work doesn't have the same value. The same opportunities don't exist. It happens. When they found oil in the ground, whaling men had to find new work. I had to find something else to do. Has it been good for journalism and journalism's important social and political role? Hell no. Are my career options or the career options of the youngsters coming after me going to be the same as mine were 30 years ago? Hell no. The internet has changed things. You want to make a living making recorded music, well, you going to have to do something different -- sell subscriptions to your own music like Dave Douglas does, be creative. Apply for foundation grants. Or, you know, get a day job. William Carlos Williams managed to work his whole life as a physician and be one of the greatest American poets. Charles Ives had a successful and innovative career in life insurance and estate planning in addition to being one of the great composers of the century. You want to get rich? You got a better shot going into banking than going into music. Always did. Recorded music doesn't have the same value it once did. There's lots of competition for people's time and money, there's a glut of available music, the industry generates about half the revenue it did at its peak on an inflation adjusted basis. When that happens, people lose work and incomes go down. I have musician friends who are struggling (especially with COVID shutting down the performance business), and I have former journalist friends who have had to find new lines of work. It's not because people were exploiting them. It's because the market for what they do isn't the same anymore. It's different from say gig economy drivers where the market for what they do is the same or greater.
They were great in many ways. In America, however, they were a pain to track down and buy, with the b-sides often unheard, because there was no Internet streaming then. Or it was very limited.
Hi dose radiation from the greater signal. Sounds like a reasonable effort. I only Spotify in the vehicle so there's no need for all that fidelity, but for the folks with big rigs at home...it's a good option. Only gripe I have with Spotify is the owners of the music property needs greater funding for it's streaming usage. I'd pay the extra dollar for proper payment for their work.
@Brenald79 - do you mean that you can't play the song on two devices that are logged into the same Spotify account? Because yes, that's true. But you don't have to ever log out.
I play Spotify via my Cambridge CVN V2 in my main system. It sounds decent. I use it mostly for two reasons: Background music and discovering new music. It saves me tons of money than before streaming. Now I do not have to buy a CD not knowing if I will like it or not. (I have bought 1000s of CDs this way and LPs too before the internet). Another great thing about streaming is if I DO like an album, I can usually buy a used CD online for $3 + $3 shipping. Most of my CDs since streaming have been used CDs and $6-$10 is much better than paying $17.98 like back in the old days. Spotify going to CD quality is good new to me. But my favorite streaming service is the lowly Pandora. I make my own channels and then I can shuffle ALL channels. With Spotify I can only shuffle one channel at a time. So I have a HUGE channel in which I have collected thousands of songs and it plays similar songs at random. And now Pandora allows you to pick an album and play in its entirety like Spotify always has. I have never liked radio. But I do like streaming. I still have not downloaded a music file in my life. I have not ripped a CD. I am just too lazy to go through all that. I would pay someone to do it because I like the idea of having all my music on a hard disc to play randomly or to choose an album. But for now I fill this void via streaming.
The last time I had a Spotify account was 2 summers ago and I remember I had to log out of a device to go from my iPad to my iPhone. If I had last used Spotify on my iPhone and went to use it on my iPad it would say I’m already using Spotify on another device and I’d have to go into the settings of the device I wanted to use Spotify with and change the device. It was really annoying. I can use Tidal with one device and still open Tidal on my other devices and Tidal instantly switches back and forth between devices when you select a song to play. That’s what I meant by seamlessly switching back and forth between devices.
For me, this is the bottom line. I like to listen to new and different music all time. I don't listen to the same familiar music over and over again. A lot of that music I'll only listen to once or twice, or listen to intensely for a few months and not listen to it again for 10 or 20 years. Now, I'm not sure I even have another 20 years left to play the thing again. And I don't what to have to buy piecemeal for $10, $15, $20, and then hold the hard copy on every album I'm curious about hearing. You know, when I was a kid, I used to go to the public library and borrow records, and not just as a kid, I used to live in NYC near the NYPL performing arts library and I'd got there and borrow stuff. I love not having to pay piecemeal and not having to hold the physical copy for every album I'm curious about hearing every day or week. Before CD-quality streaming I had gotten to the point where I was listening to less and less new and new to me music. Now, I'm back to enjoying music the way I used to for most of my life and its exciting and fun again rather than tenderfootedly buying everything I'm curious about or read about, or making an advance selection since I'm not sure which one I might wind up listening to over and over again for years, and hoping I've spent my money wisely.
yup, every bit of this. I hate that I don’t spend as much time with old favorites or some new releases, but I try to listen to at least one or two new (new to me, anyway) albums or artists every day. Would’ve been unimaginable 20+ years ago.
For a hobby that so frequently debates specs, I'm surprised at the number of people overlooking the effectiveness of marketing specs. Regardless of people that can hear the difference, a huge number of people default to the "best" option when signing up for a service. There is also a growing trend around marketing higher resolution, even in low res products. More and more headphones are aptX and LDAC. And every music streaming service is promoting high res except Spotify. People are wanting 4K and 8K displays when most content is still not in 4K. At this point, high res is on the verge of becoming an expectation, not a feature. This isn't innovation, it's keeping up with the competition. Even if people can't hear it, they can be plenty dissatisfied knowing they DON'T have access to it, so Spotify is simply meeting that growing demand. And for all those hating on Billie's recording quality, have you listened to it? She might not speak well to the sound, but her album is a real showcase of what modern pop music is capable of sounding like. No, it doesn't sound like people in a room playing instruments. It was never meant to. But you want to talk about a sound being "as an artist intended," her album really showcases the sound, depth, and emotion they were going for with a really high quality recording.
