Opus with good settings is fine. I seriously doubt you could tell the difference between lossless and Opus with a blind ABX test. Do it (you can do it at home!) and get back to me.

What's often far more noticeable is all the ways that the music is altered during production. How it's recorded, mixed and mastered. You'd be surprised what kinds of sources still get used as part of the mix today. Someone using an unshielded quarter inch cable to record a guitar amp is far more likely to contribute noise than Opus. Or a producer using Abbey Road Vinyl or iZotope. Or whoever uses some "free sample pack" that originated from an MP3 re-encoding of a poor rip of Best Service Gigapack. It's all out there.

The problem might be that you have a 7-8 mbit connection and the content providers use bandwidth scaling. I have an actual gigabit connection and Spotify is indistinguishable from uncompressed audio. Of course there's Tidal and probably some others that have lossless compression if you think you can hear the difference. Some sources claim that everyone else than Spotify pays the artists better, which might be also a reason use other services (unless you believe that the artists' work should be free).

> unless you believe that the artists' work should be free

Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation.

Anyways I want to think that there are a multitude of ways to allow global unfettered reach of the latter while ensuring the former has adequate funding.

I mean everyone is free to buy practically any pizza, in practically any form, from practically anyone, and still people get paid to come up with novel recipes.

For digital media I think YouTube and GitHub are the type of space to focus on. Compared to Spotify they are almost the kind of free services one could imagine a copyright free Netflix and Spotify could look like.

You don’t find many multi million dollar productions on the ad-financed YouTube. (You do on the completely free GitHub though). It would be interesting to find out if there are other models for YouTube-like media to get access to that kind of funds, pretty sure ads aren’t it, and copyright seems to lead to the Netflix problem.

Patreon and selling merch does it share to finance the channels I watch. But also seems limited in what can be expected.

LWN has this interesting freemium model of keeping the latest edition for subscribers only (unless they share a link), it’s kind of what Kickstarter things do too no? Some extra perks for those is provide t he funding.

Personally I would be happy to pay for “premium” YouTube subscriptions for channels doing a LWN like thing. Would probably prefer to do that through a meta-subscription service (like patreon?) built into the consumption experience to lower the barrier.

For music I see no reason these models shouldn’t be adequate. Film could be a bit mor problematic, seems like those are being replaced with series anyways though, so perhaps a good pilot is enough to secure funding for subsequent episodes.

> Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation.

It is both. Just recording music involves lots of non-creative setup and editing work, and filming typically involves a lot of logistics, set building and other non-creative labor. Equipment isn't free either even if it's not as exclusive as it used to be.

Soundcloud and Bandcamp kind of work for music, but somehow it seems that most of the artists who can get a traditional recording or distribution deal prefer going that way. I've understood that before copyright a rich patron was common way of funding art. I'm just not sure if I'd enjoy watching tech billionaires' pet projects.

That's changing. Apple Music offers Lossless and 24 bit as part of the normal subscription price now which caused Amazon Music to do the same. I personally find the quality of the AACs/MP3s fine. It's not like they are serving up 128kps files or something.

Yeah, streaming Netflix doesn't look as good as a Bluray but it looks better than a DVD or cable TV which most people are still happy with.

I do not know about apple lossless but amazon has "up to". "Up to" is not lossles. It only _could_ be. There is no indication what codec they use. So paying more for something "up to" makes no sense.

It's not more. It's the same price as a normal sub. It's "up to" because not every song is available lossless. They indicate which are.

In addition to the commenters noting that Amazon/Apple Music offer lossless, Spotify is also planning to bring out Spotify HiFi soonish. Audio quality is finally catching up…