this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And yet, they still aren't even close to the highest paying service when it comes to musicians getting their cut.

https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians

It's hilarious that Napster now tops the list. I use Tidal, myself, since it's got great quality audio. Spotify is horrible quality for 2023.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

To my surprise, even Spotify's standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify's standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar's ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that's apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn't grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would've added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

Our conclusion is that the quality "difference" is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

i figured having volume normalizer off would be the best quality

i think a lot of people that complain about the "bad" quality simply have the volume normalizer on, which makes the quality worse for some songs