Is streaming the future?

[davedotco]

Anyway, back to Swift, it's not only her who's complained. Fact of the matter is the record companies take the lion's share of the royalties. Which I think for a streaming service is entirely unfair to all its artists.

I believe Spotify pay the 'rights holder' on a per play basis. If the artist has sold most of these rights to the record company, as many do, then their is no point blaming Spotify.

The proportion of the money the artist receives is a contract matter between them and their record companies.

 

[matthewpiano]

Anyway, back to Swift, it's not only her who's complained. Fact of the matter is the record companies take the lion's share of the royalties. Which I think for a streaming service is entirely unfair to all its artists.

I believe Spotify pay the 'rights holder' on a per play basis. If the artist has sold most of these rights to the record company, as many do, then their is no point blaming Spotify.

The proportion of the money the artist receives is a contract matter between them and their record companies.

I think 'Death on two legs' by Queen sets out the pitfalls of music management and record companies nicely and plainly, and I don't think things are much different now to how they were then.

 

[bigfish786]

And many different views of this subject, my simple question has many different ways of looking at it.

is streaming the future?

the future of the music industry?

the future of home entertainment?

the future of music playback? Is this going to be the long awaited next step in sound quality?

is streaming music in your own future?

I think it will get better, it has to, to become a success, it needs to be the next big thing.

 

[Covenanter]

If you saw Collectaholics tonight there is a guy who is still buying CDs. Indeed he has 7 apartments in London full of them, over 75,000 in total, all "pop".

Chris

 

[manicm]

Waiting for Tidal to stream MQA, gaplessly of-course, then the future will have arrived. And for downloads MQA could kill both uncompressed hires and MP3 in one fell swoop.

 

[Reijer]

I like both.

One moment hopping around through spotify, the other moment enjoying a cd or some hi-res music via laptop or nas. Both has pros and cons, depending on your needs....

Just found this one: http://www.pianoday.org/ Great piano music in 24 bit wav.

 

[steve_1979]

Given the way the UK election campaign is going maybe UKIP and the Greens are the future.

Chris

Here's an interesting website that thouroughly details all of the reasons why you should consider voting UKIP.

http://reasonstovoteukip.com/

 

[jjbomber]

Here's an interesting website that thouroughly details all of the reasons why you should consider voting UKIP.

The leader is the son of french immigrants, married to a German immigrant, while campaigning against immigration. All paid for by the Brirish taxpayer. You couldn't make it up.

 

[cheeseboy]

Fact of the matter is the record companies take the lion's share of the royalties. Which I think for a streaming service is entirely unfair to all its artists.

erm, then it's the record companies (as per usual) that are at fault trying to get as much money as they can out of the artist from any revenue stream and then not passing it on the artist. It's not the fault of the streaming service.

 

[cheeseboy]

Here's an interesting website that thouroughly details all of the reasons why you should consider voting UKIP.

The leader is the son of french immigrants, married to a German immigrant, while campaigning against immigration. All paid for by the Brirish taxpayer. You couldn't make it up.

don't forget he's staunchly against the EU whilst taking a big fat paycheck from them and hardly turning up to any of the votes and the ones he does seem to vote against are ones like tightening down on illegal animal imports, whilst also decrying EU fishing quotas but then not voting on them.

 

[fr0g]

Waiting for Tidal to stream MQA, gaplessly of-course, then the future will have arrived. And for downloads MQA could kill both uncompressed hires and MP3 in one fell swoop.

unlikely

MP3 is here to stay, along with AAC and Vorbis.

They sound just as good if made from a good master and they take up much less bandwidth.

The vast majority of music listening done now is through headphones via PMPs or phones. How on earth could a pointless HiRes format muscle in on that?

 

[cheeseboy]

yeh MQA is a dead end imho, especially as you are required to have some expensive decoding kit to get the most out of it. So unless Medidian open up the codec, it just won't get enough traction. HDCD tried a similar thing, and that had more backing than MQA.

Interesting bit here on MQA and how it's meant to work, with the possiblity that without the MQA decoder, you're effectively getting a compressed stream, not lossless! http://archimago.blogspot.nl/2015/01/musings-miscellanies-on-audio-encoding.html

 

[manicm]

yeh MQA is a dead end imho, especially as you are required to have some expensive decoding kit to get the most out of it. So unless Medidian open up the codec, it just won't get enough traction. HDCD tried a similar thing, and that had more backing than MQA.

Interesting bit here on MQA and how it's meant to work, with the possiblity that without the MQA decoder, you're effectively getting a compressed stream, not lossless! http://archimago.blogspot.nl/2015/01/musings-miscellanies-on-audio-encod...

You don't actually understand MQA - natively itself it is not strictly speaking lossless at all. Meridian have developed as a PCM based high resolution encoded format which has hires characteristics i.e. high frequency and bit-rate (or equivalent), but uses less space - probably around that of WAV.

 

[cheeseboy]

You don't actually understand MQA - natively itself it is not strictly speaking lossless at all. Meridian have developed as a PCM based high resolution encoded format which has hires characteristics i.e. high frequency and bit-rate (or equivalent), but uses less space - probably around that of WAV.

interesting that you should say that I don't understand it, when I made no attempt to explain how it works....doesn't change the stance that I think it's dead before it's started, and for the exact same reasons I just stated.

 

[fr0g]

yeh MQA is a dead end imho, especially as you are required to have some expensive decoding kit to get the most out of it. So unless Medidian open up the codec, it just won't get enough traction. HDCD tried a similar thing, and that had more backing than MQA.

Interesting bit here on MQA and how it's meant to work, with the possiblity that without the MQA decoder, you're effectively getting a compressed stream, not lossless! http://archimago.blogspot.nl/2015/01/musings-miscellanies-on-audio-encod...

You don't actually understand MQA - natively itself it is not strictly speaking lossless at all. Meridian have developed as a PCM based high resolution encoded format which has hires characteristics i.e. high frequency and bit-rate (or equivalent), but uses less space - probably around that of WAV.

Given that a WAV can contain more information than is necessary for humans with the best hearing, and that FLAC or any other lossless format can shrink that, what exactly is the point???

There is none is the answer.

 

[bigfish786]

According to the news today, vinyl is getting its own weekly chart as sales continue to rise.

this has got to be good news for the music industry, and consumers alike.

a premium priced music source that is being successfully marketed.

 

[chebby]

According to the news today, vinyl is getting its own weekly chart as sales continue to rise.

That'SSSSS b-brilliant b-brilliant b-brilliant newSSSSS.

 

[andyjm]

According to the news today, vinyl is getting its own weekly chart as sales continue to rise.

this has got to be good news for the music industry, and consumers alike.

a premium priced music source that is being successfully marketed.

Unfortunately a step down in quality.

Given the rapid growth of vinyl, it will soon have nearly 1.5% of the market. Definitely warrants its own separate chart given that level of market share....

 

[bigfish786]

I would have agreed with you, vinyl had been a bit of a sonic let down. Then I bought a 40 year old rotel, that paired with my leema amp really surprised me. I bought this after listening to a friends gyro se. Since then, I've been a convert. Buying a better turntable, and a lot of vinyl. My music has never sounded better.

Buying/renting/streaming is not for me. Since y2k I have had music on computer,phone,iPod, spotify, etc, and never listen to any of it.

 

[manicm]

Waiting for Tidal to stream MQA, gaplessly of-course, then the future will have arrived. And for downloads MQA could kill both uncompressed hires and MP3 in one fell swoop.

unlikely

MP3 is here to stay, along with AAC and Vorbis.

They sound just as good if made from a good master and they take up much less bandwidth.

The vast majority of music listening done now is through headphones via PMPs or phones. How on earth could a pointless HiRes format muscle in on that?

You've actually answered your own question. Firstly, full blown hifi is alive and kicking with vinyl posting best sales in 20 years. And with the increased proliferation of portable dacs and high res players a format like mqa which promises hires fidelity at half the size of normal hires audio, and with backward compatibility, is obviously going to get attention. DSD is suddenly in vogue, so why not mqa? And I still think lame is the pits for mp3.

 

[fr0g]

Waiting for Tidal to stream MQA, gaplessly of-course, then the future will have arrived. And for downloads MQA could kill both uncompressed hires and MP3 in one fell swoop.

unlikely

MP3 is here to stay, along with AAC and Vorbis.

They sound just as good if made from a good master and they take up much less bandwidth.

The vast majority of music listening done now is through headphones via PMPs or phones. How on earth could a pointless HiRes format muscle in on that?

You've actually answered your own question. Firstly, full blown hifi is alive and kicking with vinyl posting best sales in 20 years. And with the increased proliferation of portable dacs and high res players a format like mqa which promises hires fidelity at half the size of normal hires audio, and with backward compatibility, is obviously going to get attention. DSD is suddenly in vogue, so why not mqa? And I still think lame is the pits for mp3.

Hipsters are driving vinyl sales. It's nothing to do with sound quality.

And you are simply mistaken when it comes to MP3 sound quality. I would bet a small fortune you could not ABX an MP3 ripped against a WAV or FLAC.

 

[cheeseboy]

a format like mqa which promises hires fidelity at half the size of normal hires audio,

it's only high res if you have the meridian decoding software/hardware.

DSD is suddenly in vogue, so why not mqa?

DSD has been around since 1999 as it was used/deisgned for SACD's. So, it's only taken 16 years for it for to become remotely acknowledged.

 

[andyjm]

Hi Res is all a bit pointless. 16/44.1 is more than enough for home listening, although I guess a higher sample rate would make life a bit easier for some of the downstream electronics in the DAC. My guess is that if Philips could do it all again, they might have gone with 16/48. The 44.1 was driven by the abilities of the hacked video recorder they were using to record the sample data, and not some derived threshold. Coming up with yet another 'me too' bit rate reduction approach for Hi Res seems a bit of a waste of time.

Where higher resolution does make sense is with video. We are still not at the point that the resolution of the system is greater than the abilities of human perception.

 

[manicm]

Waiting for Tidal to stream MQA, gaplessly of-course, then the future will have arrived. And for downloads MQA could kill both uncompressed hires and MP3 in one fell swoop.

unlikely

MP3 is here to stay, along with AAC and Vorbis.

They sound just as good if made from a good master and they take up much less bandwidth.

The vast majority of music listening done now is through headphones via PMPs or phones. How on earth could a pointless HiRes format muscle in on that?

You've actually answered your own question. Firstly, full blown hifi is alive and kicking with vinyl posting best sales in 20 years. And with the increased proliferation of portable dacs and high res players a format like mqa which promises hires fidelity at half the size of normal hires audio, and with backward compatibility, is obviously going to get attention. DSD is suddenly in vogue, so why not mqa? And I still think lame is the pits for mp3.

Hipsters are driving vinyl sales. It's nothing to do with sound quality.

And you are simply mistaken when it comes to MP3 sound quality. I would bet a small fortune you could not ABX an MP3 ripped against a WAV or FLAC.

I have found some superb MP3 downloads, some bad ones (a few from 7Digital), and when I rip my own CDs from LAME they sound consistently inferior to WAV rips.

 

[manicm]

a format like mqa which promises hires fidelity at half the size of normal hires audio,

it's only high res if you have the meridian decoding software/hardware.

DSD is suddenly in vogue, so why not mqa?

DSD has been around since 1999 as it was used/deisgned for SACD's. So, it's only taken 16 years for it for to become remotely acknowledged.

Thanks for stating the obvious in both cases, the difference with MQA is twofold:

1. Because of its reduced size it is ideal for hires streaming from Tidal - which will be forthcoming.

2. Also because it's about half the size of hires FLAC files - it's also ideal for downloading.

And Meridian is promising sound quality equal to the hires master. I'm not pumping MQA up, but it has attributes that can push it to the mainstream.