“Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#2Based on the comments over there he certainly isn't getting much love for the stance he is taking.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#3Personally sound quality is more important to me. I'd be a lot happier if Taylor Swift had put her foot down for FLAC-encoded downloads being made available or something.
Because trying to find those is literally impossible.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#4I assume, by the same logic, he'll be removing his music from Radio, too?
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#5An interesting stance he's taking.
Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as 320kbps MP3). [0][1]
Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an argument to make here when it comes to audio quality, particularly for the use case of casual listening.
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8863315/streaming-music-se...
[1]: http://www.whathifi.com/news/apple-music-tracks-are-256kbps-...
[2]: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experimen...
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#6I suppose that Young will stop selling its music through iTunes, Play Music and other music stores if he is so worried about sound quality.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#7An interesting stance he's taking. Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as 320kbps MP3). [0][1] Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an a…
Apple Music uses AAC, not MP3, which gets better quality at the same bitrates, so surely 256kbps AAC is indistinguishable from 320kbps MP3.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#8Based on the comments over there he certainly isn't getting much love for the stance he is taking.
Neil Young has his own digital music service, it's not surprising that he tries to promote it even indirectly by not allowing streaming of his own music:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_%28digital_music_service%...
The service offers "higher" sound quality, so of course he can write "it's about sound quality." But in fact this is only about trying to bring attention to his own service. Still I can't imagine it won't remain a specialized market, offering only "more bits" that anybody not doing remixing can't use. Better use of the bandwidth would be offering more channels -- then the users would at least be able to hear individual instruments -- but that would give them "too much power," more than having the sources of the software -- music is easier to understand and reuse than the code.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#9An interesting stance he's taking. Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as 320kbps MP3). [0][1] Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an a…
Apple Music uses AAC, not MP3, which gets better quality at the same bitrates, so surely 256kbps AAC is indistinguishable from 320kbps MP3.
Thanks, I didn't realize that! I've updated my comment to make that point clear.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#10An interesting stance he's taking. Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as 320kbps MP3). [0][1] Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an a…
Also, if you're really that concerned about audio quality, you should be campaigning against earbuds. For many, many people it doesn't matter what quality the recording is, because the limiting factor for fidelity is going to be the hardware it's playing through.