These companies will use the lowest possible bitrate with the newest possible codecs to balance quality and bandwidth. They will also default to a medium quality when it comes to picking audio quality.
I’d say they are doing their best already just to save bandwidth costs.
Just look at YouTube and how they set the video quality (resolution) as low as they can get away with.
And carting CDs and vinyl around used a lot more energy still.
We should focus on increasing renewable energy production, not degrowth.
…we can do both…
Same for Youtube for ages. But Yt has separate channels for audio, why can’t they just switch the video channels off, if the tab is out of focus?
Ads. Ads are more important to them the anything else.
Ads don’t have audio? That’s news to me.
Marketers don’t want to make ads that both work with and without the video. Radio ads and tv ads are put together differently. Ever listen to a video ad on audio only and have no idea what they’re selling?
I never really had much interest in music streaming services, given the wealth of storage on modern devices, and the ease of ripping audio from almost any source in existence.
Do we need a constant internet connection to listen to music? Is it that hard to use VLC, and just buy/download what you want, and rip what you can’t?
Using VLC is easy. Having good musical taste and finding the time to renew your library so it doesn’t grow stale is hard.
I know, I used to download all my stuff and now I just get YouTube music started on a piece I like and let it autoplay forever while I work, do a tabletop campaign, play videogames… I find that this way, I find the music it plays to be in the right mood 98% of the time.
It disgusts me to say it but it just works and saves me a lot of time.
I guess a big factor would be constant access to the internet on your mobile devices. I usually travel through internet “dead zones” (no cell coverage, wifi, or just in a building that doubles as a Faraday cage), so I find having offline music a lifeline for staving off boredom. That could be why it appeals to me more - plus the whole “they can’t take it away” side.
Music discovery is the greatest feature besides having most music available without having to rip it first. Shared playlists are fantastic as well. The platforms automatically recommend music for you, can play music similar to one song you like, and so on.
How do you share a curated playlist of songs with someone else without something like Spotify?
A .zip archive :) or for that matter, a YouTube Playlist that you can just use YTDL to copy for yourself
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Wait until they learn about Youtube, TikTok and Instagram.
Youtube and tiktok are video platforms (instagram turned into one some years after creation). Telling them to stop having videos is equivalent to saying they should cease to exist. Spotify is a music streaming platform. Telling them to stop having videos has a minimal impact on their business model, which is evident by the fact that Spotify was widely successful before they started including videos.
As if this fucking matters all while the ai hype literally spins up power plants just to handle the energy usage
It’s so so frustrating. AI is cool, I get it, LLMs are impressive, but we’re in such a bubble right now. Every company is like “damn, that other company is doing a cool thing with AI, we need to make sure our shareholders think we’re doing cool things with AI too!” So they make flashy AI things and it feeds back into the cycle because obviously other companies and their shareholders see it, because these companies are publicly traded.
