Elusive Spotify Lossless Option May Arrive as Paid 'Music Pro' Add-on

[iAppleOrchard]

Yea and I get this with my Apple Music subscription at no additional cost lol.

 

[sw1tcher]

Was it a Herculean feat to convince the record companies to license portions of their catalogs for a majority cut of the profits, including profits on a whole lot of music that wasn’t making money for them anyway, and ensuring that people no longer own the music they like so they’re dependent on these services to provide it to them, at a monthly cost?

Psst... you can still buy music either as a download or on physical media.

In fact, vinyl record sales have been increase for years... 17 years straight. 2023 was one of its strongest. Often times there's a digital download of the album with the vinyl record purchase.

Vinyl sales increase again with growth accelerating in 2023

The increase in vinyl sales has been led by new releases from artists including the Rolling Stones, Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey, Lewis Capaldi and Taylor Swift. Read on for the full story…

www.musicweek.com

Weekly U.S. Vinyl Album Sales Surpass 2 Million for Only Third Time in Modern Era

Weekly U.S. vinyl album sales surpassed 2 million for only the third time in the modern era thanks to holiday shopping and retailer promotions.

www.billboard.com

Vinyl records outsell CDs for the second year running

Some people will never give up a spinning disc.

www.theverge.com

 

[JoshuaBru]

I have to ask, if you can't tell any difference, then why are you spending so much money and effort on gear and lossless files?

Exactly. Anyone who’s spending that much money on a hifi system should be able to tell the difference between a flac and spotifys compression streaming lol because there certainly is one and it’s not that difficult to discern

 

[Supermallet]

Psst... you can still buy music either as a download or on physical media.

In fact, vinyl record sales have been increase for years. 2023 was one of its strongest. Often times there's a digital download of the album with the vinyl record purchase.

Vinyl sales increase again with growth accelerating in 2023

The increase in vinyl sales has been led by new releases from artists including the Rolling Stones, Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey, Lewis Capaldi and Taylor Swift. Read on for the full story…

www.musicweek.com

Weekly U.S. Vinyl Album Sales Surpass 2 Million for Only Third Time in Modern Era

Weekly U.S. vinyl album sales surpassed 2 million for only the third time in the modern era thanks to holiday shopping and retailer promotions.

www.billboard.com

Vinyl records outsell CDs for the second year running

Some people will never give up a spinning disc.

www.theverge.com

View attachment 2368862

Oh yeah, I know that physical media is still available, but you cannot deny that there has been an aggressive push across all sectors of entertainment towards subscriptions and away from individual purchases. The film studios have been more aggressive about this, refusing to release many titles on physical media now so the only way to legally watch it is by paying for streaming.

 

[needsomecoffee]

With how extreme dynamic range compression has become, not sure it mattters. I watched a really good live performance on KEXP, and bought the artists CD. Same performance except when the CD was mastered the sound engineer reduced the dynamics to about zero (pushed everything to "loud as possible" .. I analyzed some files in Audacity). I threw the CD out, and when I want to listen to this artist I just fire up the KEXP performance on Youtube (not great for sound quality, but massacres the CD).

 

[wanha]

Will artists see any of that “pro tier” revenue?

 

[wanha]

Also feels like “elusive” is a very kind way to describe a broken promise.

Sort of like saying my faithfulness to the wife has been elusive the past few years.

 

[groove-agent]

I've been wanting this feature from Spotify for a while as I really enjoyed it with Apple Music. However, I don't think I'd pay extra for it.

I'd go back to Apple Music in a heart beat if they would allow you to add an artists discography to your library with a single action. The last time I checked, you have to add each individual album separately which can be completely arduous and a huge pain.

I just want to be able to tap on a favourite artist and just play their discography in a shuffle, or be able to quickly choose one of their albums.

 

[sw1tcher]

Oh yeah, I know that physical media is still available, but you cannot deny that there has been an aggressive push across all sectors of entertainment towards subscriptions and away from individual purchases. The film studios have been more aggressive about this, refusing to release many titles on physical media now so the only way to legally watch it is by paying for streaming.

Is it the entertainment companies pushing us away from buying video content on a physical format, or are they merely following consumer trends? I say it's the latter.

Physical media sales (DVDs and Blu-rays) have been on the decline way before streaming took off. Sales peaked in the mid-aughts and had been on the decline since end of 2006/beginning of 2007.

While we got streaming services in the mid-aughts -- Crackle in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Hulu in 2007, Netflix in 2007 -- content was very limited. Streaming didn't really catch on and take off with the masss until almost a decade later when Netflix started producing their own original content in 2013 with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Those were considered "must see" shows.

Other companies didn't jump on the OTT streaming services bandwagon until years later:

Pluto launched in March 2014
Tubi launched April 2014
CBS All Access (now Paramount+) launched Oct. 2014
SlingTV launched in Feb. 2015
Apple TV+ launched in Nov. 2019
Disney+ launched in Nov. 2019
Peacock launched July 2020

It's why Netflix ended their disc rental program -- people chose streaming over physical discs.

 

[Chazak]

More audio hype being peddled from companies like Apple and Spotify to appear to be providing improvements that matter. But in reality to almost every user these features are completely meaningless not lossless.

Spend your money the way you wish but smarten up. Just be realistic enough to admit you can not distinguish the difference with these micro changes. Everyone thinks they are part of the 1%… a connoisseur. People are gullible beyond belief. Nothing pains them more than actually having to actually think.

Could you tell me what Apple Music has promised and failed to deliver? What audio hype is pushing?

 

[VisceralRealist]

I know that Spotify "paved the way" for music streaming in general, but I just don't consider them to be a compelling service anymore. The broken promise of the "hi-fi tier" that never comes coupled with the fact that they're overextending into audiobooks and podcasts and don't seem to know what they want to be just has me less interested in them and I gravitate more towards exclusively music-focused services like Qobuz and Tidal (which have offered lossless from the beginning). Don't get me wrong, I do think lossless should be the default nowadays (whether or not people own the gear needed to discern the difference) unless you're purposefully trying to save storage space or bandwidth, but Spotify is not likely to ever be my streaming service of choice.

 

[chrisone]

Airplay 2 would be nice

I know Spotify doesn't support it, but I don't completely understand what benefits AirPlay 2 offers - it's less buffering and better quality? Multi-room works already on Spotify on iPhone and iPad, so here Airplay 2 wouldn't offer much or?

 

[Richu]

Was it a Herculean feat to convince the record companies to license portions of their catalogs for a majority cut of the profits, including profits on a whole lot of music that wasn’t making money for them anyway, and ensuring that people no longer own the music they like so they’re dependent on these services to provide it to them, at a monthly cost?

My impression at the time at least was that there was zero appetite for this from them, that they didn’t want to boost the online market, and least the low profit streaming market, in order to protect the physical media that they dominated and had been substantially more profitable in the past.

 

[Supermallet]

My impression at the time at least was that there was zero appetite for this from them, that they didn’t want to boost the online market, and least the low profit streaming market, in order to protect the physical media that they dominated and had been substantially more profitable in the past.

The record companies are slow to change, that is for sure. I do think they saw easy piracy as a massive existential threat and streaming was a brilliant antidote to that.

 

[davemchine]

More audio hype being peddled from companies like Apple and Spotify to appear to be providing improvements that matter. But in reality to almost every user these features are completely meaningless not lossless.

Spend your money the way you wish but smarten up. Just be realistic enough to admit you can not distinguish the difference with these micro changes. Everyone thinks they are part of the 1%… a connoisseur. People are gullible beyond belief. Nothing pains them more than actually having to actually think.

I buy lossless music and when I hear a song streaming from Spotify (at highest bitrate) I can sometimes tell the difference. It has to be a song I’m familiar with and it is subtle. More of a “this is good but not as good as I remember” kind of feeling. Switching back and forth it can be noticeable. I listen using somewhat expensive speakers but young people listen with headphones where it may be more easy to tell the difference.

From what I’ve read Apple doesn’t offer lossless over Bluetooth or Airplay so how to enjoy those lossless files is a question. I use the appletv but even that resamples the file down somewhat.

 

[DaPhox]

I’m sorry, you can’t tell the difference between flac files and Spotifys current compressed garbage? Yes you can. Even the most casual listener like my wife can tell the difference. I a/b a track for her the other day and she was astounded at how bad Spotify sounded compared to a flac file of the same song.

Were they derived from the same exact mastering/file?

 

[AgeOfSpiracles]

I buy lossless music and when I hear a song streaming from Spotify (at highest bitrate) I can sometimes tell the difference. It has to be a song I’m familiar with and it is subtle. More of a “this is good but not as good as I remember” kind of feeling. Switching back and forth it can be noticeable. I listen using somewhat expensive speakers but young people listen with headphones where it may be more easy to tell the difference.

From what I’ve read Apple doesn’t offer lossless over Bluetooth or Airplay so how to enjoy those lossless files is a question. I use the appletv but even that resamples the file down somewhat.

It's a limitation of bluetooth, rather than anything Apple has decided. The latest greatest versions of AAC and aptX encoding is just barely not fast enough to reliably transmit most lossless music audio. With bluetooth, there's a fine line to balance between throughput and connection quality.

 

[iLuddite]

Apple Music already won. Sorry

 

[mcilwraith]

Spotify. King of Music. i tried them all.

 

[mcilwraith]

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

Apple Music Spotify already won. Sorry

See the chart above.

 

[iLuddite]

See the chart above.

It won if you have taste.

 

[iBreatheApple]

I like the idea of being able to play with the songs. I have always dreamed of the ability to turn different layers or instruments on and off. I know it won't be this complex, but it seems like a look in that direction.

 

[iBreatheApple]

And yet, Spotify complains Apple is stealing their business. No S**T. Apple Music is $10 and offers Lossless. This further proves why Apple Music and in general remain king.

As an Apple fanboy I find Spotify vastly superior. Though I really like Apple Music Sing and wish I had access to higher quality music.

 

[spicynujac]

Unless you’re talking about some fly by night bargain basement release, or bootlegs, commercial CDs contain uncompressed PCM, which is the definition of lossless. It’s not high resolution, but it is 16/44 lossless. The output on a CD, and with 16/44 FLAC/ALAC files, is bit for bit identical with the input. This is not the case for MP3, AAC, MQA and other lossy perceptual encoders, which remove portions of the data algorithmically that are meant to be out of the human perceptual range, so the output is not the same as the input. That is why they are lossy and CDs are lossless.

High resolution is a different thing altogether, higher bit depth and sample rates than CD, but if you fed a high resolution file into an AAC encoder the resulting file would still be lossy, because it’s the encoder which is determining if the music is lossy or lossless.

People can debate endlessly about whether a resolution is "high" or not. (Is 4K high? Or does it have to be 8k to be high?)

CDs were designed by audio engineers to be "high resolution."

There will always be some difference between digital and analog things (think a beautifully shot Kubrick film versus a "high resolution" digitally recorded movie today). Likewise, there *is* a difference between CDs and vinyl, at least to a significant number of people's ears.

BUT, the compact disc format was designed to be high resolution, taking over 44,000 individual snapshots of an audio signal *each second* and recording them. Do you think your ear can resolve and process more than 44,000 sounds per second ? (it cannot). The "problem" with CD sound is not its resolution (sampling frequency). It's just something inherent in the digital vs audio world that won't be solved by taking 100,000 or 1,000,000 samples each second. The digital reproduction will always sound different than an analog audio (which is how our ears here). And likewise an analog recording is always going to sound different than audio you hear live, unrecorded.

Calling something "high" resolution or not is a bit arbitrary. But CDs were designed by audio engineers to be high resolution, and there is a reason 16-bit audio is the standard. With all the computing advancements, it would be very easy to have 32-bit audio as a standard, and wouldn't cost much more today. But it isn't done (despite such devices existing for niche purchasers). Why? Because there is no need to sample more frequently than the 44,000 / sec which engineers already defined as sufficient to reproduce sounds digitally based on the Nyquist theorem.

Or to quote the following:

High bitrate audio is overkill: CD quality is still great

Eager to shell out a bunch of cash for hi-res audio? Save your cash, says Chris. The sample rate and bit depth of CD quality audio can outresolve the limits of your hearing.

www.soundguys.com

If your hearing can't reach anything higher than 22.05kHz, then the 44.1kHz [Compact Disc] can out-resolve the range of frequencies you can hear.

So calling a CD low resolution doesn't really make sense. And "raising" its resolution isn't going to do anything meaningful to the audio.

TL;DR CD quality is the digital standard. If you want something better try vinyl or go to a live concert