This is to make the incorrect assumption that financial barriers are the sole or even major determinant of consumption. The fact that a streaming service has 50 quadrillion tracks does not mean that I will change my listening behaviour. These services have effectively replaced a financial budget by a time budget. I am no more likely to listen to Wagner now that I can do so without financial penalty, because I can't stand the music, and I am not willing to use my scarce listening time on such music.
Rather than diminish my musical enjoyment, streaming services allow me to find more of the type of music I like through features such as "related artists". They also help me avoid buying cds because I like one track I heard on the radio. As such they are an invaluable filtering service that help me focus on music that better matches my tastes and preferences.
Geoff
Will do.
BTW the Quobuz and TIDAL USB output was different for the same tracks, for whatever reason.
I should have redirected the output to the laptop's soundcard, captured the soundcard's buffer and analysed them in a wave editor. That would've been easier and more informative. Couldn't be arsed at the end of the day.
Location: gone
Posts: 11,519
I'm gone.
I think I have tried most maybe all streaming services.
Classical music is all I really care about, anything else can take its chances.
As such, Spotify wins easily for the breadth of its catalogue and its metadata/indexing which allows you to find the music. It's far from a perfect search tool, but a bit of lateral thinking in search terms generally gets me there in the end.
Happily, I am sufficiently hard of hearing that I don't notice any shortfall in sound quality.
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Are you seriously suggesting that music has only recently become a commercially driven commodity. Look at the historical marketing of recorded music; the widespread practice of Payola; the appalling exploitation of artists and their property rights; and, the manipulation employed by the record labels to artificially boost a record in the album charts. Music is a commodity, and we make subjective choices about how we spend our limited economic resources, no tleast the use of our time.
The reason that tastes are changing is that music has competition from other leisure activities that it did not face in the past. Additionally, technology gives us greater choice over what music we listen to, and where and when. Whilst I feel sorry for many younger folk who have never heard hi quality music reproduction I am not arrogant enough to suggest that their choices about leisure time pursuits are wrong.
Geoff
Location: Suffolk, UK
Posts: 1,473
I'm Paul.