Week 6, 2025 - Music

Song of the week:

Thoughts

I noted in January that I got a sweetheart deal for Spotify to run me through 90-days. I don't think I noted that my old AirPod Pro's (first gen) were in dire need of replacing, so I wound up getting another good deal on brand new Bang & Olufsen Elevens. Which compliment my air-travel-life-saver B&O H95s that are now something in the region of 4 or 5 years old. I want the new H100s but the price is pretty silly. I also got a new car in which I upgraded the soundsystem, so there's a meaty Bose system there. Not to mention my home, which has a monstrous living room setup from Sonos, as does my office (attached to a vinyl system).

Needless to say, I love music and can't stand when the audio quality is poor. It blows my mind how willing people are to endure shocking quality when they enjoy music.

Anyway, I've had this nice new equipment for the bus/walking/etc., and have been exclusively using Spotify for a month now. And it's been pretty intriguing. I had an app transfer my main playlists, etc. which worked great. And then the discovery algorithms were able to catchup. But I noticed that the audio quality seems to have a sharp drop-off. When on wifi, it's fine. When on 5G it's fine to a point where really quickly it's not. I changed settings on my phone (I had been roaming so it flicked into low data mode) and fiddled with things endlessly. But the conslusion is fairly simply that Spotify is saving bandwidth as much as possible, so will drop the quality at any given opportunity.

When walking the dog, it does it. When in the car it does it. Even in the kitchen when everything is on wifi, it does it.

To test, one song dropped off in quality so I switched to Apple Music (which I still have as a result of our family plan with all of the things included) and the difference was insane. And with that, Spotify was removed from the app rotation.

That's my main gripe. Do not pretend to be a music fans app built by music fans and deliver dogshit quality audio. Discovery algorithms, playlists, etc., are all far superior to what Apple offers. But I will not trade core audio quality over a discoverability algorithm. And to be fair, my main method of discovery is feeds on Bandcamp and Slack channels.

The other thing I noticed is the app itself. It's not good. It's too busy. It's a bit like my complaints on Revolut; which is not my day-to-day but I am a moderately frequent user. It's so noisy that the core, basic use case is actually quite hard to find unless you do it all the time. The fact that the Spotify app requires me to click a 'music' tab to focus on music is nuts, given not once have I listened to a Podcast or Audiobook on the app.

Outside of that, their implementation of AirPlay is an afterthought, and the CarPlay implementation is poor. Really, really poor. Especially with search or just making it easy to get to something useful quickly.

So overall, Spotify is probably king of the hill when it comes to users and all of that. But Apple trumps it by any meaningful measure.

That said, Apple, fix your shitty algorithms and make it easier for folks to create & share playlists.

Photo of the week

(via my flickr)

Tabs

Meta

Published on: 8th February, 2025

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