Today, Spotify is thriving as a company and the major record labels have their hands in it. Sure, they have some work to do to figure out how to become profitable and sustainable, but they've come a long way.
I subscribe to both because one is not a subset of the other, which I dislike.
But hey, it’s been great, and I’ve actually found new music I love on Spotify/Tidal, unlike every other platform which has attempted recommendations.
I can definitely hear the difference between 96/160/256. Between 256/320/lossless I'd probably fail an ABX test [1] and I'm very doubtful of anyone claiming to hear the differences between 320/lossless regardless of how much of an audiophile they claim to be if they refuse to take an ABX test. I'd maybe believe telling 256 and lossless apart but still be doubtful without any ABX results.
[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/system_settings...
A confounding variable is that Spotify may use different bit rate heuristics than Tidal when streaming, so I’d need to preload the albums to be compared on both platforms, but I’m willing to conduct it blind.
A bigger complaint for me, honestly, is that Spotify’s navigation does not do what I want it to. (e.g., when trying to go to an artist’s page from a song, it just won’t do what I want.)
In the end, Spotify's content discovery was worth more to me, but if they finally release some lossless version for twice the price, I'll be happy to subscribe. Even at that price, one month of Spotify is stil cheaper than the first R.E.M CD I bought in 1991.
Spotify has been streaming 1411kbps for most tracks through their browser player in Chrome and only then I notice little difference between Spotify and Tidal HiFi. The Masters tracks still are noticeably better than the Spotify on Chrome app playing at 1411kbps.
There is an upside to streaming from the Spotify Chrome app for 1411kbps which doesn't incur extra cost but this is all functionality Spotify is not advertising. The downsides are this only currently works in the US (IIRC) and navigation in the Chrome Browser app is very limited compared to the desktop app.
I'm very surprised you were not able to notice a difference with such a great stack as the HD800s + Mojo and suspect it was something else in the chain limiting the potential. I suggest giving even just Spotify direct in the Chrome webapp a try again if not Tidal and ensure you have the chain configured properly.
You cannot compare bitrates directly like that.
1411.2kbps is uncompressed CD audio, while the 320kbps is a highly developed and advanced psychoacoustic format that aims to be completely equivalent to CD quality to the human ear.
So it's not "getting less than 1/4th of the music", like some audiophiles claim, based on faulty or non-existent understanding of audio codecs.
Also, you are absolutely not getting 1411.2kbps from the Spotify Chrome app. That is simply a display issue, or the actual decoding happening at another step in the chain, and it's either giving you Ogg Vorbis at 320kbps or AAC at 256kbps.
Or at least they claim they can. I've yet to know anyone with any expensive systems who claims to be an audiophile who can actually pass an ABX test with any more accuracy than random guessing would have given them. Largely because they'd need superhuman hearing - able to hear things that are literally outside the frequency of normal human hearing. Not saying these people can't exist... just that it's extremely unlikely.
But yes, absolutely buy merch and go to shows, and support artists through Patreon. For the sheer amount of enjoyment these people give people, I think most can afford to support their favorite artists a little extra.
I am a Soundcloud Go+ (or whatever their premium tier is called by now) subscriber, and it is the worst. They don't have the same catalogue available like Spotify, the alogrithm constantly shows me outright garbage (young aspiring musicians? More like 15 year olds with a mic in the basement) and their app... I don't know how a company that old can have an Android app that is so shitty. It even misses the subscription status and won't let me play my collection, even when 2 minutes earlier (and later) it all worked (works) fine.
Can't wait to end my subscription there and move to Spotify/Apple Music.
Edit: Cuz steaming? lol
Sure, there are a lot of unknown/aspiring/indie artists on Youtube and nowhere else, some of them are even quite talented, but if I can find audio literally anywhere else, I will use that instead.
Although I've graduated, Apple seems to think I'm still in school and is still only charging me $5/month. The moment that ends, I'm switching to Spotify. Also, the Apple Music app on iOS is horrible. Spotify's app is so much better.
With Apple Music and human curators, I can actually find new music better. And I can get my rock fix when I need it.
I know Spotify has a similar student deal but for whatever reason I went with AM and now that I've graduated I've just kind of stuck with it since they still charge me the student rate.
Apple Music is incredibly awful at music discovery, and even fairly bad when it comes to just showing me music I might be interested based on what I've listened to. For example I might listen to one song somewhere without necessarily liking the genre of it, and then AM repeatedly shows me music for that genre. Not very intelligent.
I built Amplitude [1], which uses Spotify's recommendations API to create artist based discovery playlists, if you need more new music than Discover Weekly provides and also Rediscover [2], to save your discover weekly playlists so you don't lose songs.
Spotify used to have apps which had something like this (... I forget the name of the app), it's good to have a replacement.
I would happily pay $1 a month for this. Where is the $12 a year subscription?
I do wish there were better ways to shape what songs end up in there as sometimes it can be a bit of a miss.
Even if it's based on Electron, their Linux desktop client at least exists and this is reason enough for me to keep being a subscriber. The web player is working but is missing features and has some major bugs (e.g., I cannot "dislike" a song on a playlist). My one wish would be for it to get on the same level of playlist management that Amarok, Foobar2000 and similar music players were on like 15 years ago...
Amazon Music's desktop client, despite also being Electron-based, is only available on Windows and Mac and its usability is so bad, I cannot even describe it. There is a reason why Amazon Music is a lot cheaper: it's worse in every metric beside costs that I were evaluating.
Electron does not make cross-compilation easy. It's about as cumbersome as building any other C++ project for multiple platforms.
That said, I'd very skeptical of investing in Spotify. Apple Music has a real chance of becoming the default service everyone subscribes to on their iPhone without thinking twice. Apple Music just have to be good enough.
I wouldn't worry about Apple too much, the market will become saturated in some countries after some years where they are popular. But in other countries, where they only use Android, who do you think will win the market?
Only in US.
As a listener, I'm quite happy about it too. Sure, a lof of there is a bit meh to me, but I've easily discovered 50 new artists that I like a reasonable lot through that channel.
Yet I never moved on to Spotify, rather started browsing and buying on bandcamp (who have a great weekly podcast, just enough for me).
I actually think the Apple Watch is a pretty interesting product and I'm a bit interested in buying one, but the lack of Spotify support has turned me off the idea for the time being.
From Idea to Execution: Spotify's Discover Weekly
And remember that not every project is a rock band. Think of an ambient, experimental artist creating calm music for home listening and an adult audience - those artists won't fill any venues or impress their listeners with colorful t-shirts. They rely on album sales.
And a lot of musicians don't make anything, or are actually losing money. But they keep doing it for the love of the art.
Would I like to see these talented individuals properly compensated? Hell yes! But between predatory record labels and the sheer vast number of people out there also producing music, it's not easy to break through.
Apple Music on the hand hasn't even verified my artist profile— which I need in order to view analytics. So I don't even know if people listen to me there.