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Comment by jmacd | Hacker News Reader

Just here to share that if you haven't tried Apple Music for its lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality then you really, really, should.

Apple Music does not have a great UI but it is definitely worth the trade off.

Tidal sounds great, but they make you pay extra for lossless and have a smaller catalogue.

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If you can consistently tell the difference between Spotify Premium's 320kbps and Apple Music's lossless, I am very impressed. Most folks reading this won't be able to.

Having used both, I'm now happily paying for Spotify to avoid using the train wreck that is the Apple Music app. It is a true shame what Apple has done to iTunes.

Just depends on how you are driving it. I can tell the difference on Homepods, Airpod Max, my car (wired) and few other places, but barely on airpod pros and most other bluetooth headphones. And to the crowd that has their keyboards handy to say "but the airpod max and homepods do not support lossless", you are absolutely right but the quality of the source does make a difference, even though those devices will not be playing lossless, they will still have better quality if the source is better.

I am not completely sure if its the codec Apple uses that is making the difference or if it is because the source is lossless, but bass sounds punchier and instrument separation is much better with Apple Music compared to Spotify's best quality.

I was really looking forward to Spotify's lossless that was announced (I think it's called Spotify HQ?), but I haven't heard about that in a long time.

Edit: If you plug in your Airpod Max with a hardwire cable, the difference is even more noticeable, even with iPhone's internal DAC.

Also want to clarify that the differences and not so pronounced that you will be able to tell right away, but if you listen to Apple Music for a while and try to listen to the same song on Spotify, it will not sound the same. It's one of those cases where you don't know what you don't know till you know it once.

You can definitely hear a difference when the Apple track is using Atmos or spatial audio and your system or headphones support it.

Also, I’m not certain, but I think the tracks that are studio masters are often mixed differently. I’m not sure what it is, maybe greater dynamic range (cd tracks are louder). I think it sounds better.

Even though Apple sounds better, I probably still use Spotify more because the client isn’t as terrible (or at least is terrible in different ways that I’m used to).

Not sure if that’s the question you’re asking but, the Atmos mixes are a completely separate deliverable. They need to be the same length as the original stereo master and obviously shouldn’t deviate so much that they sound like a different piece of music, but there’s a lot of scope. Also, the loudness wars are kind of over now that streaming platforms normalize to a loudness target; if your track is super hot it’s just going to get turned down.

I think it’s less the lossless than the higher bit depth & Atmos adding extra channels.

I’ve been a long time Spotify user but the difference in quality is very perceptible (to me at least) and I find myself using Apple Music a lot more.

Apple Music is just so increadibly bad UX wise. I have a real hard time justifying paying for it and have considered many times to switch back to Spotify. Trying to find new and interesting music is pretty much impossible outside of the "here's what people listen to now" playlists. You need to know what to look for when searching for things.

Spotify was great for finding indie music bands, and could really give good recommendations. Apple music is not even in the same league.

> Apple Music is just so increadibly bad UX wise.

Is it? When I switched to Apple Music I didn't find it remarkably better or worse then anything else I've used (including Spotify). Reviews (https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-music) don't mention any UX issues either. If you know of any substantive commentary on this I'd appreciate a link.

It is. In my personal experience:

- On Mac, Apple Music will just consistently stop playing audio. Force quitting & restarting fixes it.

- On iOS, the app is prone to crashing more than any iOS app I've seen. It's not horrible (I very rarely see crashing period), but it's far more than 3rd party apps or even Apple's own set.

- On iOS and on a weak connection, Music will not play even if it is downloaded. I suspect it has something to do with DRM servers, but don't know for sure.

- I once changed my iCloud password on my account, and it sent the Apple Music app into an infinite loop of trying to reload content, instead of just prompting for my password again.

- Load times are horrendous for online content, even on fiber connections.

- I don't have many complaints about discoverability, but it's certainly nowhere near Spotify's recommendation engine. Spotify's weekly-updated new music playlist is way more relevant to me than Apple Music's version (New Music Mix).

But...

- I think way more people can tell the difference between Spotify's audio quality and Apple Music's Lossless/Atmos. I sure could, and it was obvious.

Anecdotal, purely in my personal experience I have never once ever had Apple Music crash on any of my devices. This is across multiple generations of MacBooks, iPhone, and including CarPlay. Nor have I ever had it just stop playing music. Strange.

>I think way more people can tell the difference between Spotify's audio quality and Apple Music's Lossless/Atmos. I sure could, and it was obvious.

But have you blind A/B tested this with a third party? I don't mean to be combative, but the audiophile community is ripe with this kind of thing. People claiming that a speaker cable (or sometimes even a power cable) gives them better quality audio.

And then once you blindfold them and ask them to tell which is which, suddenly the differences aren't so clear.

I mean it's obviously purely anecdotal, but I would by no means consider myself an audiophile. I use Airpods Max at my desk and Airpods Pros during my run, and that's about it.

I would love to see someone do this experiment though, maybe I am an audiophile and didn't even know it.

You need not fear, for if you were an audiophile there is no way you could use Airpods.

Your perceived change in audio quality is more likely to be placebo in the justification of your own platform choices. Spotify high quality is certainly transparent on the equipment you use, as the drivers in those headphones are physically unable to provide enough detail to show any differences between that and lossless.

I switched to Apple Music from Spotify just because I don't like podcasts mixed in with my music, and UI that constantly advertises their podcasts side.

The improved sound quality on Apple Music is a major benefit, and I was able to add all my music that isn't in their library (and sync across devices).

I also love that upcoming albums that drip feed new tracks aren't categorized as EPs like Spotify does it. I can view the track in the upcoming album on Apple Music, add the album to my library, and then get notifications as they add more tracks or release the album.

Apple Music's macOS app UI is terrible, no way around that. They're supposedly making some parts of it native in a future macOS release though.

Might I recommend you check out the Cider client? I've been using it for a while and its pretty decent.

Oh neat! Been looking for a better Windows client. I'll check it out.

Reminder that Apple pays artists better too (average penny per stream over Spotify's average 3-4 tenths of a penny per stream).

And that Spotify is led by people who think artists who want that level of compensation are "entitled":

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

But its not like Spotify is making billions off the artists. They barely break even. Their margins are very very tiny in the first place.

Obviously Apple can afford to pay a lot lot more. Now obviously you can say that if they can't afford it they shouldn't be in business, but you can say the exact same for the record labels/artists. They can just pull their songs from Spotify.

I think it’s unfair to say they barely break even, if they do then it’s because they’ve decided to spend so much.

Looking externally at the company they’re listed as having 50,000-100,000 employees. That’s a lot of people to employ for a audio streaming service.

I also happen to know their cloud commitments (I know a guy) and they are large enough that it starts to make a lot of sense to invest into physical hardware.

I’m talking so much money per year that it rivals the GDP of some countries.

>Looking externally at the company they’re listed as having 50,000-100,000 employees

Uhhhh. Do you mean Apple or Spotify? Spotify's 2021 Q4 press release says:

>At the end of Q4, our workforce consisted of 7,690 FTEs globally.

I actually meant Spotify, I must have misread something and I’m off by an order of magnitude, LinkedIn says 10,500~ people who have Spotify as an employee on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotify/

Labels are their own problem for sure, and Apple has advantages over Spotify (I'd guess they mostly come from the fact that Apple can run its digital distribution infrastructure at a profit even without music altogether).

I don't have any sympathy for Spotify, though. No one has done more than they have to create the price point expectations for products like theirs. They should have known it wasn't enough. They probably did know and like most growth phase startups simply decided to care until later if ever, and any negative enduring impacts on artists be damned.

>No one has done more than they have to create the price point expectations for products like theirs.

I think Napster/Limewire/Kazaa were far greater influences on price point expectations for Music. This reads like complete erasure of music distribution from 1999-2011. Not to mention you already have companies like Rdio and Grooveshark that were pretty much squeezed to death by the labels.

Yes, Advertising is a poor way to monetize such a service (just look at Pandora), but Apple is in a privileged position being able to start today with a subscription only service; one that is enforced by their market position in devices. There is no way you could have pulled that off in 2008, and the reason for that was piracy.

> I think Napster/Limewire/Kazaa were far greater influences on price point expectations for Music.

Unauthorized copies have been a fact of life not only through the dawn of the P2P era but back through the cassette era. And you don't even have to get into the ethics of that in order to understand that none of them ever set price point expectations. Everyone involved in that activity ultimately understood that they were not participating in economically supporting the artist (or indeed, in any economic transaction at all). Everyone was clear on the accounting.

Spotify adopted an economic model marginally different from piracy but with the veneer of a legitimate economic transaction, the pretense of some kind of proper accounting.

So yeah. It absolutely did more to set price point expectations.

> Rdio and Grooveshark

Rdio and Grooveshark are weird examples to pull in, Rdio because it was always too late and too small to have really made that much of a difference, Grooveshark because it started life as more of a P2P tool. What's next, pointing out the missed relevance of audioscrobbler/last.fm?

> There is no way you could have pulled that off in 2008, and the reason for that was piracy.

The primary reason you couldn't have pulled that off in 2008 was economic contraction, not piracy.

If you actually look at the RIAA sales history figures you can see it:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

The total sales volume peaks quite clearly coincide more with macroeconomic trends than technical trends. CDs get huge during the "irrational exuberance" of the 90s. It dips with the dot-com crash, but even with P2P taking off like crazy and digital retail barely getting off the ground, the amount of money going into CDs is more flat than downward ... until 2007, of course, and everyone knows what happened then. And the recent primary huge revenue growth in streaming has coincided with periods of big economic growth.

And you can also see the story in there of digital retail growth from 2004... up until streaming cannibalized that.

> Spotify adopted an economic model marginally different from piracy but with the veneer of a legitimate economic transaction, the pretense of some kind of proper accounting.

How does your critique of Spotify not apply to Apple? They lack a free/ads tier, and claim to pay a bit more to artists. Does this fundamentally change the fact that they’re still /streaming/?

/Streaming/ itself isn't the problem. The problem is the /payouts/. Retail revenues were replaced with fractional revenues more suitable for broadcast. That makes life economically more difficult for musicians.

So my critique could apply to Apple in approximately the ratio between their payouts and Spotify's (averaging around $.01 to $.004).

I would also point out that Apple's scheme starts to get into territory that looks reasonable-ish as a replacement for recording retail. Ask yourself how many plays you're likely to get out of a single you buy. If my recall of my iTunes history is any indication, it probably averages out to around 50. $1.00 a track, 70% to artist, that's right around a penny per play.

Of course, there's a short peak (opposite of long tail) of more individually popular tracks that people will play hundreds of times. Those the economics probably works out down in the tenth-of-a-penny range. But even then, retail incentives were better -- front-loading payouts creates a situation where new-music-creation is incentivized more heavily, leading you to be more likely to have more from your favorite artists if there's more to make.

>Everyone involved in that activity ultimately understood that they were not participating in economically supporting the artist (or indeed, in any economic transaction at all).

I don't believe you can present this decision as independent of piracy and business model. The reason for Spotify's abysmal payouts compared to Apple's has to do with the _business model_. Advertising is an awful way to pay to content when it comes to music especially when you have to placate labels. You are making it seem Spotify just kept the money for themselves, when there simply wasn't that much money to go around.

>Rdio and Grooveshark are weird examples to pull in

I bring them up (and include Pandora) because they had the functionally the same business model; to appease labels by giving them advertising revenue. It didn't work because the revenue wasn't there.

>The primary reason you couldn't have pulled that off in 2008 was economic contraction, not piracy.

Spotify was founded in 2006; and launched in the US in 2011 (the same year Limewire shutdown). You could not have launched a successful, subscription only streaming service the year limewire shutdown. Your chart is a great resource - look how tiny the "On Demand Streaming (Ad supported)" revenue bar is; that is the "money pool" most artists are drawing from when they get paid from Spotify.

To summarize, Spotify's payouts are historically terrible and will continue to be terrible for as long as they continue to support their free product. The advertising market just isn't there, and all those free users depress the pay per streams that Spotify provides. Spotify's "price expectation" was driven by the fact they likely needed to launch with a free ad supported product or they would have never succeeded in the competition with piracy. Apple now enjoys only having to compete with Spotify, and not with Limewire, and doesn't have to offer a free product. With a much larger revenue pool to draw from, per stream, their numbers naturally look better than Spotifys.

The effects of piracy cannot be discounted; even Jobs practically built iTunes and the iPod on the backs of piracy.

Cause they can manipulate the market and don't have to give 30% of their income to an unchecked monopoly

I don't believe Apple pays better out of the goodness of their own hearts. It seems much more likely that they pay more because that's what they need to pay to get artists on to their platform.

Apple posted profits of $34.6 billion last quarter. Use whatever service is most convenient for you, but I take umbrage with trying to paint a trillion dollar corporation as altruistic for paying a penny per stream to a musician.

Apple Music’s best feature for me is its real focus on building up your own library. On top of that, it integrates seamlessly with iTunes in the Cloud. Using the same app, I can stream anything from my iTunes library, which includes a decent amount of music not available on any DSP.

I am a pretty big Apple Stuff Fan. Have owned their stuff since my first translucent baby/aqua blue iMac. Including laptops I've purchased for kids headed to school over the years, I think I've purchased 8 laptops and 4 iMacs.

I did Spotify for a year. Then I did Apple Music for a year. Family plan both times for the whole family. I switched back to Spotify after a year of Apple.

Spotify let me catalog, and find music better. The rest of the family agreed.

I found this BYU Divine Comedy amateur sketch to sum it all up pretty well. Particularly the Apple experience parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvqcNBksCXE

I’d prefer to use AM but they’re lacking an ability like Spotify’s to play to Google Home devices and device groups. We use that feature daily, and I highly doubt Apple will ever support broadcasting to Chromecasts.

random sample but i try this every couple of years - both tidal and apple music do not have 10 songs in today's release radar list available.

the tidal client is nearly as bad as spotifys too

The android app of apple music is terrible though. I've tried using it for a month but had constant trouble with it getting stuck loading searches or artists. I've switched to tidal a few days ago, and that seems to have odd issues with buffering (despite having stable 6MB/s downloads with steam).

I'd bet my next paycheck you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a blind test.

http://abx.digitalfeed.net

> lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality

General headphone recommendation? Best I have is an MDR-7506 but I don't think it's meant for listening rather producing.

Depends on price range. DT 770 PRO's would be a nice step up and serve both purposes pretty well. They're over-ear like your MDR's. You can usually find them on sale for like $140-160 USD

Fairly neutral response (dunno if you'd prefer something bassier for listening) and very comfortable

Yeah I don't really have any specific demands other than it is meant for music... I bought these ATH-MX-20/40X from reviews and apparently they're monitoring headphones?... so yeah. Those are definitely flat.

Thanks I'll put those on a list. Definitely one of those things have to try on in person to buy but recommendations help too.

Edit: not too bassy actually, neutral would be nice like works for almost anything.

With some of the banal EDM that's out there now, some retro 1980s walkman headphones would do.

Would do for... What, exactly?

I use these for both without issue.

It is nice for being able to pick out specific sound, it's very clear. The downside I think about is the treble/how "too loud" the highs are sometimes.

I currently own the Sennheiser hd 650's[1] with a Schiit amp[2] and absolutely love the combo. I also have them on a harman curve. You can get the HD 6xx from Massdrop for cheaper and it's the exact same driver[3]. My partner uses the Sennheiser 58x's[4] as well as she doesn't like to use an amp and they are probably the greatest bang for your buck I've come across.

[1] https://en-us.sennheiser.com/high-quality-headphones-around-...

[2]https://www.schiit.com/products/magni-1

[3]https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-sennheiser-hd6xx

[4]https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-x-sennheiser-hd-58x-jubilee-he...

Thanks that'll probably be a next model up, it's up there in price for me.

Will keep it in mind I'll compare the 58x to DT 77 although open backs limit usage for me I think (not have other people hear my music).

Looks like the 58x is better than DT 77 though without using eq

This one of those things drives you insane so many choices

Yeap... I went with Sennheiser 560S and I'm not pleased lol compared to the 7506 that I've been using for over a year. The 560S everything sounds blended.

Will give them a chance/listen for a bit. Just funny you get this obsession like "I gotta buy it" then disappointed.

Amazon Music Unlimited also has it included in their catalog. How does Apple's fare against Amazon's?

I have no interest in paying one of the large American tech giants for my music. They already control too much, and music is a side business for them.

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