That may be true, but artists typically get far more than 3x the number of plays on Spotify compared to Apple Music.
I know from personal experience.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Spotify Preparing to Launch Long-Awaited Lossless Audio Tier on iPhone
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That may be true, but artists typically get far more than 3x the number of plays on Spotify compared to Apple Music.
I know from personal experience.
so encourage more people onto platforms that pay better...
while i used Spotify for many years, the constant promise of features that never arrived, useless ones that did that they paid too much for and the nanny EU state protecting them, I switched my playlists to Apple Music. 99% survived the transfer. Happy.
Artists get paid under different agreements in many cases.
The rights holders get paid by the streaming service (who may be the artist) and then they pay the artist dont they?
The industry is certainly different these days.
But artists have always been screwed by managers and the industry...
The reasons Spotify gives:
- A larger percentage of their customers live in countries with lower subscriptions prices.
- They have a free, ad-supported tier, that pays lower rates.
- Their average customer listens to more streams per month than the average Apple Music listener.
If you were to say "Subscribe to Apple Music instead of Spotify, because 3 times as much of your money will go to the artists you like", that would be false. To be clear, I'm not claiming you said that, but I think the claims of 30% and 3x are deceptive without context.
That kinda makes it worse. If you're seeing similar amounts of money from both platforms despite one of them bringing you 3+x more streams, that sounds like a ripoff to me
The thing is that it does make enough of a difference. For years now every chart of average pay per stream has put Apple Music at two to three times Spotify's amount, despite Spotify being much larger. AM isn't the highest paying service (ironically, the highest paying service is Napster — who would've thought?), but it's hard to defend Spotify for choosing a business model that consistently devalues the art of music in comparison to competitors, especially when tech's biggest crybaby Daniel Ek keeps on finding ways to scam artists more and more every quarter.
A very overlooked problem with streaming services is that apart from lossy or not, they seem to differ in terms of in-app processing, as well as in which masterings they serve for the same albums. This news only confirms this: There is a lot of music being mastered at 48 or 96 kHz. If Spotify serves this in 44.1 kHz, it is NOT in fact “lossless”, even if it is FLAC with no “lossy” compression algorithm. Because the sample rate conversion between 48 and 44.1 will deteriorate the sound, in ways that are just as bad as lossy compression.
The only way I know to be sure to receive the actual, unprocessed master file is to use Qobuz. They are the only service that actually publicly commits to doing exactly that. All the others are just delivering marketing speak.
The only way I know to be sure to receive the actual, unprocessed master file is to use Qobuz. They are the only service that actually publicly commits to doing exactly that. All the others are just delivering marketing speak.
Who is “people”? The majority don’t care about quality of anything. The majority don’t care about Apple either, yet here we are on Macrumors. I don’t give a rats behind about what “the majority” likes or prefers. What the **** do they know?
There are people who care. For those people, lossless matters. And I don’t even care if I can tell the difference in a blind listening test. That’s not the point. This argument is tired and misunderstood. There is NOTHING that can be proven in a blind listening test, if you break things down in small enough chunks. So, you can very easily demonstrate that each of the 1000 differences between a Sonos speaker and a JBL Everest speaker is inaudible on it’s own. Yet, the end result is wildly different.
The people who care about lossless, are the people who understands this. It’s not about whether you can hear the difference between 320kbit and 800kbit. It’s about whether you appreciate the result of caring about those minor differences in every step of your system.
The really interesting thing about this discussion is that Spotify is objectively, measurably worse than Qobuz. That is undeniable. The only discussion is whether you can hear it. The same can’t be said about a lot of other things audiophiles care about. I just don’t understand the motivation behind actively trying to decrease the quality JUST enough that you don’t hear it. If you keep doing that throughout your system, those “undetectable” differences will pile up and result in crappy sound.
True, but not for the reason you think.
I disagree with your definition of “lossless”, but see my post above on why I agree that delivering 44.1 kHz is not lossless.
Time will tell, but if Spotify is happy to sample rate convert 48 kHz material to 44.1, I don’t trust them to deliver the 44.1 either. A sample rate conversion is agnostic to the input signal, meaning that it will take whichever incoming signal, convert it to a waveform (essentially analog, even though performed in the digital domain - difficult to grasp, but that is essentially what it is), and create a new sample at 44.1. That means that the incoming 44.1 kHz samples are not necessarily the same as the outgoing 44.1 kHz samples. It can be, but the easy way to engineer it is to not care. If the input is not the same as the output, it is in fact not “lossless”.
I know I’m making a lot of assumptions here, but Spotify has not yet proven that we should not just assume the worst.
If the master was created at 44.1, then yes it is (with the caveats of my posts above). “Master” is not a fixed quality, it is whatever quality the producer created.
192 and 96, but yes.
Which is why we should highlight this fact, and push as many people as possible to use a service that actually pays the musicians. Instead of just accepting the status quo.
You just repeated your claim without addressing my points.
If you and I both subscribe to Apple Music, and I listen to twice as many songs as you do, that means the artists are only getting paid half as much per stream from me compared to you. Does that make your subscription more valuable? (The specific artists I listen to may technically get more from me, because I increase their share of the pie, but overall I'm paying less per stream. I'm not exactly sure how the payout calculations work)
And if the music labels don't want to get paid less from ad-supported service, they should disallow Spotify from streaming their music on ad-supported service. Unlike Apple's iPhone and iPad App Store, Spotify is not a monopoly. There is no device that can only play music from Spotify.
Spotify gives most of their income to rights holders. Apple gives most of their income from Apple Music to the rights holders. If you don't like what musicians are being paid, take it up with the record labels, or support musicians through other means.
Did you know the median Apple salary is less that 1/3 of the median Alphabet or Meta salary? Do you think that is relevant information without further context?
If 100 million users who pay for a Spotify subscription were to switch to an Apple Music subscription, musicians probably wouldn't be paid any more, on average. Maybe a few percentage points of difference. Definitely not by the amount people infer from the per-stream revenue statistics that people carelessly toss around without context.
What do you mean by "small enough chunks"?. If I can't tell the difference when listening to a minute of a song in a blind test, I don't care what the bitrate is (if that minute is representative of the most challenging to compress music that I might listen to).
I can understand that higher than perceptible quality can be beneficial in the production pipeline, but once it comes to the final output, all that matters is how I perceive the final output, without the bias of knowing the technicalities of the encoding.
not sure what you mean about a 44.1 Khz being converted to another file... sensible method would be to just send the supplied file AS IS.
what I do agree on is a supplied 48KHz file supplied being converted to 44.1 KHz stands a chance of being messy and not the same quality as that supplied. the 44.1 KHz file is still lossless due to transmission but the conversion beforehand is the weak point.
thing is I doubt what is streamed, lossless or lossy, hasnt been compressed or tinkered with one or more times before it hits your ears.
Years ago there used to be premium CDs that were marketed as "Original Masters". Carefully digitized conversions of analogue tapes. No clipping on peaks.
16 bits doesnt really give much headroom for playing with when mixing. Make something quiet and you risk losing the lowest volume bits. If used correctly, 24 bit files offer significant leeway. Of course, audio engineers still need to care about what they are doing...
i've had enough "indestructible" CDs flake off with CD rot over the years that no amount of error correction fixes.
the move to pure digital files that can be copied is a much better audio storage solution.
sorry your maths logic on this eludes me...
if Apple pays 2 cents and Spotify pays 1 cent per stream of a song, the more Apple users who listen, the more the rights holder gets paid. three times more.
all paid streaming services have users who are heavy, medium and light use. light users arent getting great value for the small number of tracks they pay for compared to what gets paid out.
For your $10 a month subscription at the rates Spotify pays holders, you would need to stream 2000 - 3300 songs a month before they lose money having you as a subscriber. 6000 minutes of three minute pop songs. 100 hours nonstop. 5 full days a month.
Perhaps this explains the sudden rise of 2 1/2 minute album tracks...
So it's possible to listen and cost Spotify more than you pay them.
May 2024 data shows most Spotify users listen to 25 hours a month.
Effectively you paid $10 and music rights holders get $2.50 on average.
I've seen someone stating Spotify pay 70% of income to rights holders while Apple pays 52%.
I cant see how...
Meh.
I don't do music streaming. Not Spotify, not Pandora, and definitely NOT Apple.
With over 11k songs in the music library, why would I? If I want something new I'll download it, not stream it.
I don't do music streaming. Not Spotify, not Pandora, and definitely NOT Apple.
With over 11k songs in the music library, why would I? If I want something new I'll download it, not stream it.
That’s not what I meant. I mean that if you compare lossless to 320kbps, you may not hear a difference. Compare 320 to 256, you may not hear a difference. 256 to 192. 192 to 160. 160 to 128. 128 to 96. For every step, you probably won’t be able to reliably tell the difference. So now you have “proven” that none of these differences is individually audible in a scientific double blind AB test. Now compare 96 kbps with lossless. If you can’t hear that difference, you shouldn’t be listening to music in the first place.
Apart from that, I can guarantee you that I can teach you to hear the difference in a few minutes, If I get to choose the tracks to compare.
It would seem that way yes. However, there are many situations in digital audio where the engineering behind transporting the file untouched is more complicated than allowing a sample rate conversion. I don’t know the inner workings of a streaming service, but I know for a fact that this happens inside some relatively expensive hifi equipment. Some even lets you turn it on and off, because sample rate conversion off causes issues. So, unless a streaming provider comes out and promises an untouched file (which only Qobuz has done to my knowledge), I am not going to assume that an untouched file is what I am getting.
Who is comparing bitrate quality in this way?! The simple test is: for any given encoding mechanism, how does it compare to the best source that you have.
So if you can’t tell the difference between lossless and 320 kps, that means that 320 kps is a high enough bitrate for your listening needs and any higher bitrate than that is a waste of storage/data bandwidth/money.
Similarly the comparison between lossless and 256 kbps. Or lossless and 192 kbps. You pick the lowest bitrate at which you can’t hear any difference to lossless.
Do that under ideal listening conditions, using your best equipment, and then that bitrate will suffice for all listening conditions. If you are paying for lossless when you can’t hear a difference, then you are wasting your money. (If you can hear a difference - and this might be because lossless has been mixed assuming a higher quality of playback equipment and quieter listening environment rather than because of the compression algorithm) then it is money well spent.
Last edited:
Ok, that makes sense, but I don't believe anyone is suggesting that testing method to determine the optimal bitrate. I would test each bitrate compared to uncompressed, and choose the last one where I couldn't tell the difference.
I actually did that test recently on a blind abx comparison site, and couldn't easily and reliability tell the difference on the clips they chose. I have lost much of my hearing above 10Khz, and have some (mild?) tinnitus. I used a pair of $100 headphones (Sony MDR 7506) plugged into my PC motherboard.
I can assure you that I can still very much enjoy music at 96 kbps, and it's bigoted of you to suggest that I shouldn't be listening to music because I don't have golden ears.
Perhaps at a lower bitrate, and if I had better equipment, but I doubt you could at the highest lossy bitrate Spotify provides.
I feel similarly about video quality. When people say they can't tell the difference between refresh rates, I know that there are real situations where almost any person could easily tell the difference between 120Hz and 480Hz refresh rate, if they know what to look for.