Amazon launches lossless high-res music service!

[GrimSurfer]

Yep, the organised pirates will already have ways of dumping the data perfectly, but why bother with pirate copies when the legal way is simple and low cost.

Yup. All wars are economic.

 

[amirm]

If Amazon is making a power play for control of the music market, releasing the application programming interface freely to the digital commons would make sense. If music streaming is simply another profit vehicle, they probably won't because they stand to make money on licensing the API.

Music has always been a loss leader for retailers. New music would come out once a week and people would go in to buy that and store would hope that they sell something else to them. This motivation could stop Amazon from giving up the control of the UI. But since they provide access to embedded devices, I am hoping they don't follow this instinct.

 

[amirm]

This API is around metadata, not music data, and the current limitation hinders people moving to Amazon, not away so it probably will get added.

My read of the post was that they are not giving permission or API for account authentication. WIthout it, the service cannot be accessed.

 

[ZeDestructor]

Yep, the organised pirates will already have ways of dumping the data perfectly, but why bother with pirate copies when the legal way is simple and low cost.

In my case... I have a bit of an archivist streak, so CDs, DVD-A (I *love* multichannel albums) + ripping is where it's at!

 

[audimus]

Yep, the organised pirates will already have ways of dumping the data perfectly, but why bother with pirate copies when the legal way is simple and low cost.

For one-time payments for a purchase you are correct. The price of a CD played that delicate balance between the two.

But for access only under a current valid subscription, it may be simple but it is not low cost especially if one is only interested in a small subset of the catalog. With piracy, you can download once and don’t need to keep paying to listen to it and you will have access to it after you have dropped a subscription if you had one. More people will think this justified because they have already “paid” for it.

I am not making a case here for piracy, so there is no misunderstanding. Just saying calculations are different that encourage piracy.

Games are a different category. Their byte size, accounts necessary to play them online, etc., provide additional controls to prevent piracy unlike music, even UHD music.

 

[Soniclife]

My read of the post was that they are not giving permission or API for account authentication. WIthout it, the service cannot be accessed.

The account info they want is for people's playlists, fav songs etc, to extract and to populate this data, their service is around enabling people to change streaming service without loosing their own personal data.
I cannot think of any service that offers open access to play music via an API, without contracts in place.

 

[audimus]

My read of the post was that they are not giving permission or API for account authentication. WIthout it, the service cannot be accessed.

Not exactly. Amazon account authentication is already available via a Oauth variant for third parties to use for various Amazon services.

What is not available, from what I understand, is access to the music account data once authenticated which will include things like playlists, history, catalog available to that account (which may vary based on geographical location or subscription tiers if any, etc). Without this, third parties cannot provide a useful interface for people to use the subscription. Getting access to the actual song metadata once the above is possible is the easy part.

Amazon can do one of two things. Allow this access only via their own closed wall interfaces but allow those interfaces to send selected music out to participating devices. So the devices don’t need access to Amazon data at all. They just play what the Amazon controlled apps tell them to play as a stream.

Amazon can open the interfaces so that third parties can provide their own browsing, selection and play interfaces on the chosen streams. This one is a lot more complicated to enable for security and privacy reasons more than any piracy issue.

 

[Soniclife]

For one-time payments for a purchase you are correct. The price of a CD played that delicate balance between the two.

But for access only under a current valid subscription, it may be simple but it is not low cost especially if one is only interested in a small subset of the catalog. With piracy, you can download once and don’t need to keep paying to listen to it and you will have access to it after you have dropped a subscription if you had one. More people will think this justified because they have already “paid” for it.

I am not making a case here for piracy, so there is no misunderstanding. Just saying calculations are different that encourage piracy.

Games are a different category. Their byte size, accounts necessary to play them online, etc., provide additional controls to prevent piracy unlike music, even UHD music.

If you are only interested in very few new recordings over what you own neither streaming or piracy make much sense. If you like exploring music whilst piracy enables you to do it cheap, it is far from an enjoyable process, compared to streaming. Streaming is a music lovers paradise.

 

[dmac6419]

From your lips to Gods ear.

MQA is for streaming everyone don't have unlimited data from the phone company to stream full flac files.

 

[GrimSurfer]

If you are only interested in very few new recordings over what you own neither streaming or piracy make much sense. If you like exploring music whilst piracy enables you to do it cheap, it is far from an enjoyable process, compared to streaming. Streaming is a music lovers paradise.

Yeah, piracy was not the crisis it was made out to be. I recall seeing RIAA data showing that the majority of people casually pirating music ended up buying it. This coincided with the broad availability of online music purchases and streaming, so one could posit that the driver for piracy was easy access and review (as opposed to long term theft).

That said, the industry followed the adage of "never waste a crisis". So they used Napster, Pirate Bay et al as an opportunity to reassert controls that had slipped through their fingers while they dozed through the introduction of the digital era. They did so in various ways, one of which was through "remasters", which reduced quality so as curtail consumer access to high DR (read near master) quality. (Remaster were cut for other reasons too, including re-recording tracks and passages as a means of resetting copyright expiry dates in certain jurisdictions.)

Things changed again with the introduction of streaming, where the compunction to give listeners (not consumers) access to 24/96 (which truly is in the range of master files/tapes) was removed because (in theory) it only touches their ears. It's not owned or controlled by consumers, which means that risk has been somewhat mitigated.

Like all things involving emerging tech, there is a big BUT to all this. Streaming services capture a massive amount of data about users listening choices and practices -- data that the industry would kill for. How this factors into streaming services contracts with labels is anyone's guess... but these are the Crown Jewels that control of the API also protects.

 

[Julf]

MQA is for streaming everyone don't have unlimited data from the phone company to stream full flac files.

MQA doesn't actually use any less bandwidth than a full quality FLAC file.

 

[audimus]

If you are only interested in very few new recordings over what you own neither streaming or piracy make much sense. If you like exploring music whilst piracy enables you to do it cheap, it is far from an enjoyable process, compared to streaming. Streaming is a music lovers paradise.

I completely disagree with all parts of the above which provides a false choice. This has already been explained in an earlier exchange. I would say streaming is a paradise for quantity (or ephemeral consumption like movies for example) over lasting and discriminating music tastes.

Streaming subscription provides for discovery without a purchase. But not all of us have the time to pour through the catalog in an uncurated fashion to see what sounds good. Especially if one has picky/discriminating tastes. Piracy is not the choice here, Internet radio is because you can almost always find a few stations that curate for the tastes you have. And you decide that you like some of them and you want to listen to them over and over again.

Then you have a choice between owning and subscribing. Because the things you want is only a specific subset, paying a subscription over and over again makes no sense.

There is actually an interesting phenomena amongst the teen crowd. Most of them have subscriptions from peer pressure. You must have a subscription so whenever the crowd you belong to say something new is cool, you must have access to it and this keeps changing and a fad of the day or week so there is no point in downloading or owning. This is actually the best case scenario for the streaming services.

Except for those few favorites that teens like and want to keep on all their devices. Then (illegally) shared MP3 files are the most common form of distribution. As long as they keep a subscription for the above reasons, this isn’t a problem for music labels or streaming services.

But peer pressure for the latest cool thing doesn’t apply to other demographics especially as they get older and if some of them develop picky/discriminating tastes, having a subscription to keep looking at new things or to discover music no longer makes sense. Not because they are not serious music lovers. On the contrary...

Piracy will become an increasing option if the outright purchase is too expensive or you have to have a subscription to access it.

 

[audimus]

Yeah, piracy was not the crisis it was made out to be. I recall seeing RIAA data showing that the majority of people casually pirating music ended up buying it. This coincided with the broad availability of online music purchases and streaming, so one could posit that the driver for piracy was easy access and review (as opposed to long term theft).

This is true as long as there is an option to buy and its effective price determined how the ratio was split between piracy and legitimate purchase. It was a delicate balance.

But streaming services without purchase options will increase piracy not decrease it because the effective cost of a tune you like and want to keep in a subscription model is much higher than a purchase option.

So both need to co-exist. But it also requires that some minimal protections do exist for streamed services that discourages the majority from easily having downloaded access to what they are listening. The tech savvy and pirates will always have a way around it but that is a niche.

 

[GrimSurfer]

Piracy will become an increasing option if the outright purchase is too expensive or you have to have a subscription to access it.

This is a very interesting thought. It begs the question of what will happen as streaming crushes physical sales. Will the music industry simply get rid of physical content? Or will they charge consumers considerably more for it?

Beyond the issue of scales of economy, sales of music (as opposed to renting music) could become another profit centre for the industry and squeeze the average slob (such as myself) out of the ownership end of the market.

Of course, they'd have to spice things up with something extra... So it would be noteworthy if a "beyond Redbook" format was heavily backed.

 

[Neddy]

Can you search by "ULTRA HIGH DEF" for "24/192" ?

Well, yes, but what do you get in return?
I tried searching on "ultra high def", and it returned a lot of what appear to be playlists in "HD" (so, really returning things with that in the title description).
The selections within those playlists DO appear to be all "UHD" (by their definition), including 24b44.1 tracks...but I have not sampled very many yet.
See screen shot, attached.
So it looks like the full truthful answer is "sort of", but probably not what you were hoping for, and (slightly) better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

"24/192" returns only tracks/playlists with that phrase in the title.

I found most of the CDs I had in my wish list are there (so far all at 44.1, haven't tried searching on SACDs yet).
Still, I like it, and have even pre-ordered the (just released) new Roku Ultra streamer - hdmi, of course, and who knows what/if Amazon will stream multi-channel discs.
I did load the Amazon Music app on my old 'plain' Roku, and it taps into the same "HD" UI as on my desktop, but haven't played with that much yet, so don't know if it even 'transmits' "UHD" via that device.

 

[audimus]

This is a very interesting thought. It begs the question of what will happen as streaming crushes physical sales. Will the music industry simply get rid of physical content? Or will they charge consumers considerably more for it?

To be fair, I don’t think the music industry itself really knows or is fully in control. It is like they are being swept down the rapids and all they can try to do is not kill themselves doing something stupid but that hasn’t stopped them before!

It is still too early to tell if streaming will crush outright purchases. Right now, streaming subscriptions are being subsidized by a combination of losing business models supported by investor money, as loss leader options for other business models and a large tail of musicians that are providing content without making money.

If one or more of those factors are removed as they must for long term viability, the cost of subscriptions may reach a point where user growth and revenue growth flatten and even start to reverse. Then people will be talking about cutting cords but this time about music.

The best case for smaller streaming services is to make hay while this sun shines and hope to go IPO or be acquired so they make a lot of money for themselves before there is a reckoning and businesses fail.

Anyone thinking that this is some sustainable golden age for music consumption haven’t seen the details.

 

[day7a1]

accounts necessary to play them online

You mean DRM.

There is a lot of options when it comes to the delivery and distribution of digital copies, but I think the music industry showed everyone that relying on hard copy "ownership" isn't realistic in the digital age. Software, movies, games, music, etc. are all copyrighted intellectual property. The same legal framework applies for all of them. You can't legally (17 USC 109(b)(1)(A)) sell a ripped CD but still listen to your copied file. This is prima facie evidence that you don't "own" the music.

Sure, you own the CD itself, i.e. you have first sale rights, but that's only in the case of the hard copy and assuming it wasn't copied. If one of those remains usable, though, you violated the copyright.

Most of the users of digital content have accepted that they never did and never will "own" the content in the same way that they own a non-digital product they purchase. CDs have the unfortunate property of being developed prior to the technologies that eventually allowed their easy copy. Likely, the only reason they still exist is because streaming or digital download is better than stealing and the piracy "market" dried up. There's a huge backlash in music against DRM and it's a bit weird given that no one even thinks about it with other digitized intellectual property.

If you're simply talking about what format is best, then yes, its preference. If you have issues with the current streaming business model and how it affects music, I do too and I look forward to the evolution of a better model.

But if you prefer CDs because you think you "own" the music, you don't and you simply never did. Just because the nature of the format makes it easy to break copyright and impossible to enforce doesn't make the legal or ethical fact of the matter any different. This isn't really a matter of how you think things should be, this is simply how it is by (US) law. There is no actual "rent v. own" debate. It was decided about a decade ago. The issue is "how is renting going to function in practice". The practice looks different for different media, but the problem is the same.

Forgive me for assuming you weren't still litigating decided case law.

 

[audimus]

You mean DRM.

... rest deleted

No.

 

[MusicNBeer]

Dumb question, is this supposed to work with the Bluesound Node 2 (no i)? Is see no hd option in the BluOS app Amazon Music sub-app.

 

[GrimSurfer]

To be fair, I don’t think the music industry itself really knows or is fully in control. It is like they are being swept down the rapids and all they can try to do is not kill themselves doing something stupid but that hasn’t stopped them before!

Anyone thinking that this is some sustainable golden age for music consumption haven’t seen the details.

Agree with both of these points!