tl:dr
artists and studios should start selling tiered levels of tracks based on more realistic pricing with bulk discounts. Stream lossy, buy hires. Streaming hires just uses too much bandwidth. Tie tracks to key pair scheme and reissue keys for free, or a nominal fee to purchasers of record for 50 or 75 years. Get rid of physical media to reduce costs.
start stream of consciousness…. ;-)
Tidal mqa tracks frequently get interrupted and they use much more bandwidth than qobuzz”hd”.. (rural area)
I cannot even listen to an entire track from tidal “masters”.
streaming is a convenience… thats all. Been too busy to do ripping, cataloguing, playlists etc.
personally would rather just buy hires and play from NAS. Finding what I want is a pita though.
And yes, I can tell the difference between a sparse and a dense file playing on my system.. especially as I increase the volume.
Wish the studios, or the artists, would just start, more widely and greater selection, selling tiers of product with increasing data density.
But I also get the whole piracy thing being a huge issue. Maybe utilizing some kind of key pair scheme with tpm (as long as you can transfer your keys to a new device) Studios could eventually just sell the keys to enable playback.. then they wouldn’t have to provide as much bandwidth either.. say I give someone a copy of, lr torrent, a BD I burned as a backup, the recipient wouldn’t be able to play any of the tracks without a key.. I wouldn’t give them mine.. but they could just buy a new key. People sharing keys would need to be subject to penalties.
Though I will say that whoever is doing the selling MUST keep records for 75 years and re-issue keys, maybe for a nominal charge, for already purchased unlocked tracks. It’s just plain stupid that vendors can charge for a replacement copy of , or access to, a digital file.
However, a more realistic approach to pricing would help also.
some people will always steal, even if the product were $00.01 apiece, but I think alot of people would willingly buy a 192/24 (or 32) at something like $00.25 song for a 2-3 hundred track collection.
I could get on board being able to buy an artist’s entire collection, say AC/DC or Metallica at 192 (not lars’s base heavy remix with his left to right circular crossfading bs though). Back it up on a blue ray and stick that in in a safe and use a nas on the lan for source to dac. add key to NAS for file unlocking. Or even just an individual song for a buck.… have a discount scheme for purchasing an entire album or collection. Less money for lower “quality” (aka tiers of mp3, lossy and lossless). Studios could compete also on codecs… who does more etc and which ones (alac, flac etc) The whole physical media thing is not needed any longer anyway.. well, except for vinyl… those folks need to have a product to spend that money on…
Then maybe we could get away from these “ultimate quality” compression or “folding” or other types of bs, get the artists paid, the studios paid, control piracy a bit and everyone can enjoy the, honest, level of compression they are willing to purchase and listen to. (And no, I don’t care what anyone has to say about “all you need is 44.1”.. or 96, or 192 or whatever. reminds me of gates saying no one would ever need more than 640kb of ram…). End of my rant for the day..