lossless Spotify anyone?

https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...20#44366773762221420

Glad you were paying attention. Lossless is viable now whereas it was not before.

It would be a good solution for me, I'm used to the interface and have hsd my account since it was all free. Time will tell I guess

I'd certainly need some assurances on quality Allen. The going rate appears to be £20 for lossless and £10 for 320, hopefully more and bigger players entering the market will increase competition and drive down prices. If reports are to be believed Spotify, with its huge customer base, is not making money at £10, Apple will need a hell of a lot of subscribers at half that and if their quality follows that of the Beats brand it may not be worth it anyway. I doubt I could bring myself to sign up with Apple, I dislike them as a company intensely

A couple of thoughts.

Apple makes it's money on hardware. Will Apple/Beats be run as a business i.e. to make a profit in the way Spotify one day hopes? Or will it be a free or low cost add-on to make the hardware more attractive in the way free productivity apps and cloud storage are bundled. Apple and to some extent Google are in a position to run streaming as a complimentary loss making business. Spotify isn't.


The obvious followup question is how will you be able to access an Apple/Beats streaming service. Will there be a public API for companies like Naim to use, or will it be restricted to only Apple devices like the iPhone or Apple TV. This would be my biggest concern. I got my first Mac in 1985, and if there is one thing I have learnt in that time Apple always does what it thinks is best for Apple.

Interesting though that the case against Apple re DRM and tie to its hardware (iPod) struggled to get a plaintiff and when eventually it did, the case was thrown out by the jury.

I think Apple is the only computer hardware company that promotes and support art and music and has done do long before its huge growth.

In hope their wall gardened approach continues.

In any event AirPlay has been open source, and not licenced to death like Blu-Ray, for example and Apple works companies if it chooses, such as it does with Naim.

Jude

One of the many reasons I dislike Apple is their tendancy to try and lock their customers into their system, and I've been watching the current, collapsing, court case on their shennanigans with drm and mp3s with some interest.  Personally I think Apple have been bad news for music and music lovers and that they have treated consumers with contempt, especially in the early days where they were selling music files that were of shockingly poor quality but I'm sure if they go into this in a big way they will make it work, I just hope their entry stimulates competition and innovation rather than killing it.  With much less domination of the mobile phoen market I would guess they would need to open it up to other devices to have anywhere near enough subscribers to make their offering competitive though

I largely agree Apple's been a force for good where music is concerned. It's not that long ago that CD sales were on the floor and music downloads were something of an illegal wild west. iTunes made it easy to buy and transfer music to your computers and devices.

I don't like the term walled garden, in so much as I don't think it's particularly helpful. Apple's tight hardware/software integration coupled with it's desire to provide a safe and private online experience are essentially at one with one another. You only have to look at Android to see what happens when you cede control over your operating system and  online services.

I'm a super happy Beats customer, so my principle concerns for the future are about maintaining what's great about the service while still making it possible for me to choose the platform I use. Right now that means Sonos, Apple TV, iOS etc. If I wanted I could also use it with Android or Windows Phone. I'd be supper happy if I could use it natively on a Naim streamer in the future.

Amen to that, Greg 

One of the interesting things about the failed DRM lawsuit is that it shows many of the restrictions like file quality and DRM were conditions of the record companies granting Apple access to it's catalogs.

It took Apple 6 years to remove DRM and up files to 256k. In six years Spotify has gone from 160-320. You could argue that's roughly comparable considering iTunes started selling music in 2003 and Spotify in 2008.

As I said earlier I don't think Apple will feel any pressure to do anything other than what it feels is best for Apple. Google has it's advertising revenue, Apple, it's handsome hardware margins to subsidise a music service. They only need to be competitive in the same way they need a maps app, web browser and email client on a mobile device.

Google's announced Music Key. I'm pretty sure Apple will make it's move in the next 6 months, so we won't have long to wait and in the meantime we can enjoy Beats, Qobuz, Spotify et al. 

Whatever happens,  competition is a good yhing and it will be interesting to watch

If Spotify goes lossless, the major online music download sellers will have to begin selling files in lossless or hi-res to compete. This will be the nail in the coffin for CDs.