Undoing the Enshitifcation of Music
I used to like music. But streaming services and reduced bit rates killed my interest without me even realizing it. Now I'm rediscovering physical media and Hi-Fi audio.
I used to like music. My high-school years were at the peak of CDs and college was the advent of MP3s. Then the streaming services came and you could have access to nearly all of the worlds music for a low monthly fee so I haven't bought a CD or downloaded an MP3 in almost 20 years. I've also slowly lost interest in music.
For a long time, I thought this was just a side effect of maturity. Maybe being really into music was a young person's game and I had grown past that. But recently, I've been learning a lot about how the smartphone has become the focal point of our lives, the enshitification of online services, and all the emerging strategies for digital minimalism, and in doing so, I had a bit of an Ah Ha! moment.
Non sequitur incoming! I carry a multi-tool with me all the time, a Leatherman Wave+. It has 18 different tools: straight-edge and serrated blades, screwdrivers, pliers, saw, file, scissors, etc. It can do a lot, but it doesn't do anything well. It's only strength is its portability. Beyond that, it's a crappier version of a variety of real tools, but it's better than nothing when you're away from home.
Now this might seem like common sense to you, but I have never really thought about my smartphone in the same way until very recently. It has a camera, but it's not as good as even a point-and-shoot digital camera. It can stream video, but not with the image and sound quality of a Blu-ray player. You can play games on it, but it's not as good as a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck. It can play music, but with lower sound quality than a CD player.
This last point is what I want to focus on for this post. I have discovered that my waning interest in music over the past two decades has been in large part due to the fact that music just sounds hollow most of the time. We have been conditioned to accept low-quality audio for the sake of convenience. Streaming service offer all the music you could ever want but at lower bit rates than we used to get on CDs. And we listen to it through either crappy built-in speakers or tiny little wireless ear buds. Every step of the way from the studio to our ears, the sound quality is diminished for convenience. The bit rate is reduced by the streaming service, your phone has a low quality digital-to-analog converter (DAC), there's compression and loss in the Bluetooth connection to your ear buds, and ear buds are not great speakers. By the time it reaches its destination, it's just not worth listening to anymore.
To prove my point, I performed an experiment. I don't own a device with a CD drive anymore (I think most people these days don't) and I don't own a single CD. So I bought an external CD drive from Amazon and a used CD from The House of Guitars.
For this experiment, I ripped the CD into two different formats (using fre:ac if you're interested) and compared the sound quality to Spotify's free tier. The first is a high-bit-rate MP3 (320kbps), which is a good compromise between file size and audio quality. The second is FLAC, which is an exact copy of the audio from the CD but the files are much bigger. I'll share them below so you can listen for yourself. Don't sue me, Dave!
Dave Matthews Band - What Would You Say (Spotify, Free Tier)
This is what many of us have grown accustomed to. It's music, but does it make you feel anything? Is it anything more than just background noise? You can play with the equalizer settings or get better headphones, but nothing will make up for the fact that the stream is omitting a lot of the nuance from the audio.
Dave Matthews Band - What Would You Say (320kbps MP3)
This version might not sound all that different if you listen on your phone with ear buds, but if you listen on a device with a decent DAC (like a computer), using a good audio-player app (like Audacious) with decent headphones (like ones that, you know, cover your whole ear), and tweak the equalizer, then the difference is like night and day. The high-bit-rate files brought me right back to my high-school days listening to CDs on a player that didn't suck with actual headphones. It has a much richer sound when band is really jamming. This is what music used to sound like!
Dave Matthews Band - What Would You Say (FLAC)
This version is 4 times the file size as the 320kbps MP3 and I can't detect much of a difference. I'm sure if you have a serious Hi-Fi setup then maybe it would be worth it, but I don't and I don't think I will be going that route anytime soon. So it looks like MP3 is the way to go.
Have I been an audiophile this whole time and didn't know it? Maybe. But I don't think wanting a listening experience that doesn't sound like elevator music is an unreasonable request, is it? Now I'm seriously considering buying a digital audio player and ripping all my favorite albums like it's 2002.
In addition to higher audio quality, when you buy CDs or MP3 files, you actually own something. You aren't renting the music and subject to the whims of companies like Spotify, Amazon, or YouTube. Your music can't be taken away from you, moved behind a pay wall, or peppered with ads. You can access it while offline, which I have been trying to do more often lately. And it isn't on a device that is constantly trying to hijack your attention. I'm looking forward to exploring this more and I'll report back when I have more to say about it.