The Truth About Music Streaming

[rwortman]

I've had an argument with a university prof of psychology over this. He was adamant he was immune to cognitive bias because he designed blind tests for a living.

I had an email exchange with a very famous audio writer who was sure he was immune to it too. No one is immune. When I am I am enjoying the music, I really don’t care much about the mechanisms of perception. I know what I hear and I know what I perceive are effectively the same thing unless I am performing some sort of test. Bias works both ways too. We can fail hear things that are real because our dogma and our test results say they can’t be.

 

[Bernard23]

Agreed. I've got to an age where I observe two things: that ground truth matters, and there are well established processes to obtain it, that's been my day job for the last 40 odd years near enough. Applying that rigour to consumer audio is an interesting side show, ultimately irrelevant unless you're business (seller) or health (buyer) depends on it. Like you perhaps, I just buy stuff I like the sound of, I'm not really bothered too much if it's not correct, unless I paid for that expectation of course; but that's a principle of life, not limited to some holy grail of audio perfection.

 

[thecheapseats]

As always, I don’t represent my posts as the last word. I’m happy to be corrected or educated by other contributors.

stumbled upon your thread late (obviously)... however your phrase, "poverty spec home router" made me spit my afternoon coffee... hilarious - a sincere 'thanks'...

 

[Liya]

1. Browsing new weekly releases on streaming service is similar to how I used to browse shelves at the local CD shop twenty years ago. I was accepting some albums and rejecting many others. For me, album cover is just as important as music. Really. If you can't get album cover art right then what sort of music you are going to present?

1. One of the reasons I maintain downloaded music library is booklets for classical music. Apple Music Classical is a step in the righ direction (because of their correct use of metadata) but for me to fully switch and use them they must have digital booklets attached to albums. You can get a lot of useful info from the booklet. Like latest Isabelle Faust's Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. There is an interesting interview with Isabelle and Francois Roth that is completelly missing if all you do is to listen to the album on Apple Classical, Tidal or Spotify.
2. Tidal and Spotify integration with HiFI is elegant (plenty of streamers). Apple Music integration is very limited (only one streamer: Sonos. Then Airplay, which I wouldn't like to use. Third solution: iPad connected via cable to a dac, which is not good as my dac is 5 meters away from me; apart from that I think iPad is a great streamer! All native apps of anything you want. You can't beat that and none of the stand alone hifi streamers will ever match that!). A fourth solution would be Apple TV, but then I would need to have a TV on while listening to music or I would need to invest in a bulky AV receiver just to have Apple TV hdmi routed thru it).

 

[Yuhasz01]

Same here...
I don't remember, how much I was spending on CD.. I got to close to 3000 CD.. I ripped these to a NAS; this was my most favorite source of music. This NAS was backed-up by another in my office and, yet another NAS one at home and .. Streaming came...
Then I realized that I could not reliably tell the difference between music in 250 Kb/s mp3, even less VBR 250 AAC or ogg-vorbis and started listening through Spotify.. Game changer , more music, more convenience then, I discovered Tidal in lossless , then Apple Music and my collection is gathering digital dusk. It is on a 2 HDD...
Paying about $20/month is IMO, worth it fore the virtually infinite libraries of music at my disposal via Apple and Spotify. I sometimes, am concerned about the streaming companies raising their prices... I find myself inching closer to $75.oo/month for movies subscription with Netflix, Disney, Amazon,etc.
Still, music streaming has been a game-changer and a source of enjoyment for me.

Peace.

You use other people’s assets( rent) which can increase price at any time …. Or go bust as a company. I prefer to be a farmer on my own land than a peasant working for others for their benefit

 

[FrantzM]

You use other people’s assets( rent) which can increase price at any time …. Or go bust as a company. I prefer to be a farmer on my own land than a peasant working for others for their benefit

Hi.

I suppose your reply came from your private part of the Internet, connected through your private ISP.. then again , you must have to reach the rest of the global internet ... Not renting access?
You always "rent" something. You chose to not rent your music.. I posit that those who chose to rent their music have access to more music than you could ever... The risk of seeing my subscription fees increase are well worth it for us


Peace.

 

[Zensō]

Hi.

I suppose your reply came from your private part of the Internet, connected through your private ISP.. then again , you must have to reach the rest of the global internet ... Not renting access?
You always "rent" something. You chose to not rent your music.. I posit that those who chose to rent their music have access to more music than you could ever... The risk of seeing my subscription fees increase are well worth it for us


Peace.

Agreed. And streaming fees are very unlikely to rise significantly due to the fact that Apple, Google, and Amazon—the companies that will ultimately control music streaming—do not need to make a profit directly from music. Music streaming for these behemoths is just one small value-added feature (among many) to entice people into their ecosystems.

 

[thecheapseats]

....Music streaming for these behemoths is just one small value-added feature (among many) to entice people into their ecosystems.

concise and so true ^^^

 

[Yuhasz01]

Hi.

I suppose your reply came from your private part of the Internet, connected through your private ISP.. then again , you must have to reach the rest of the global internet ... Not renting access?
You always "rent" something. You chose to not rent your music.. I posit that those who chose to rent their music have access to more music than you could ever... The risk of seeing my subscription fees increase are well worth it for us


Peace.

I value quality music and recordings over streaming buffets of suspect quality that can disappear at any time.
I can learn about new music many ways: concerts, reviews, books , friends and music school seminars.

 

[Cawafuoshi]

I once was an avid Microsoft Zune user. I went on a spending spree with them and purchased a good deal of music. Some I downloaded, plenty not. Then I started living under a rock, and when I came out I had missed the grace period when purchased titles and albums could be still downloaded before the service went bust.

I know, my fault but also a “flaw“ of the medium involved. Catalogues, streaming rights, etc. do change and music might not be accessible any longer.

Lesson learned. As long as my Sprint/TMO subscription includes access to Tidal Hi-Fi Plus, streaming will be a viable platform, but I never will throw out physical media.

 

[ribonucleic]

Offsite backup of one’s own digitized music files is the only reasonable assurance of indefinite access to one’s music.

 

[Hayabusa]

Being quite ignorant about streaming, it's not feasible to record the files in some manner?

sure, just have audacity record your loopback device. Quite some manual work, but it works..