With streaming services every bit counts as far as hosting costs and scaling up to the number of users. They are always looking at ways to reduce cost and pursuing more efficient encoding methods. Adding lossless audio to streaming would cause the audio stream to more than double in size and very few people care about lossless audio. On top of that, the discrepancies between streaming and disc audio largely comes down to the mixes vs. the codec used.
Yep!
We can list a dozen reasons it’s hard and/or not necessary….and appeal to profit margins getting squeezed, audiences not caring, etc.
And all those statements are true.
That was also true of:
lossless music on Apple Music,
or HDR, or
Dolby Vision, or
4k content.
Or even Atmos…..
…which are not as easy, cheap, nor a big perceptual difference for many users.
But
Apple is typically not happy with being pegged to the lowest common denominator in terms of content quality. In fact they have often tried to differentiate themselves by being in the upper quartile.
So hopefully they step up here like they have in so many other areas.
Now do I believe they will? Maybe not until someone else does. They didn’t offer lossless music until other services did.
