Surprisingly, Apple Music streams at a bitrate of 256 kbps, which is lower than most of its competitors. Spotify, Rdio, MOG and even Beats Music, which Apple Music’s streaming foundation is built on, all stream at 320 kbps (Beats Music still streams at this quality on Android and Windows Phone devices, rubbing even more salt on our wounds).
And then there’s Tidal, which manages to stream its music at the lossless FLAC bitrate of 1411 kbps. So what gives, Apple? Why is the biggest and baddest new streaming service on the block peddling inferior audio quality?
You would think that an article about music streaming would be written by someone with some knowledge about how digital music works, or at least research about it before publishing a post. Beats streamed 320 kbps MP3 files, while Spotify a variety of files. Apple Music streams 256 kbps ACC files.
256 kbps ACC files are comparable to 320 kbps MP3 files, and people find the lower bitrate AAC having higher fidelity, but apparently Tech Radar and several other writers only look at the bitrate and accuse Apple Music of serving inferior quality.
Spotify streams MP3 files at 96 kbps on mobile and 160 kbps on desktop and web player for the free service. It streams 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis files for Premium subscribers.
No, Apple is not adding DRM to songs on your Mac you already own
Just like every other streaming service, Apple adds a DRM (digital rights management) layer to its streaming music collection. This keeps you from getting a subscription, downloading a ton of music in month one, then canceling the subscription. Instead, if you cancel Apple Music, all that streaming music becomes inoperable. […]
Then, any songs it can’t match, it uploads directly to iCloud; when you download a copy of those songs on a different device, you’re getting the same file you had on your Mac.
So what gets DRM? Any matched track you download to another device. It gets DRM because the file itself is coming directly from the Apple Music catalog, which, as we established above, has DRM on it.
Uploaded tracks that you re-download will never get DRM, because they’re not coming from the Apple Music catalog.
Mass panic because “journalists” jumped to conclusions instead of investigating before they write.
While its main draw is privacy, DuckDuckGo has another killer feature you may not have heard of. In fact, it should cause you to consider ditching your existing search engine for DuckDuckGo — yes, even Google. I’m talking about bangs.
Bangs have transformed how I search ever since I switched to DuckDuckGo as my default search engine when iOS 8 was released.
Cook lost no time in directing comments at companies (obviously, though not explicitly) like Facebook and Google, which rely on advertising to users based on the data they collect from them for a portion, if not a majority, of their income.
“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.” […]
“We shouldn’t ask our customers to make a tradeoff between privacy and security. We need to offer them the best of both,” Cook wrapped up. “Ultimately, protecting someone else’s data protects all of us.”
Why is Android still the second platform developers work on?
Despite his love for Android, he and Martin were hesitant to launch on Android first:
“Everything we’ve read, every number we’ve seen shows that it’s really difficult to get people to pay for apps on Android. We didn’t think we could release a paid app on Android and create something sustainable enough to fund further development.”
But the bigger issue is getting the app to work on Android.
Dave Feldman, co-founder of Emu, a third party messaging app, actually bucked the trend of iOS first and launched Emu on Android in late 2012. By April of 2014 Emu was pulled from the Play Store and launched on iOS. Developing Emu for Android hit a lot of issues working with SMS/MMS, dealing with Eclipse, and, of course, device fragmentation.
Feldman told TechCrunch, “We were finding Android in general to be a slower platform to move on. There’s more time spent dealing with fragmentation bugs. There’s more time spent dealing with testing and debugging, and we would rather spend that time building new functionality.”
According to Feldman issues they faced with fragmentation were particularly perplexing:
“On a Galaxy S4 with Samsung’s Multi-Window feature enabled, Emu’s popup windows are squished by the keyboard. This doesn’t happen on the Galaxy S4 sold by Google, without Samsung’s software modifications; or with the Multi-Window feature on the Galaxy S3. We’ve investigated, but because it relates to Samsung-specific functionality, we probably can’t fix it without direct cooperation from them.”
“On some Galaxy Nexus phones, when you’re listening to Pandora and get a notification sound from Emu, Pandora’s volume drops. This doesn’t happen with other apps’ notifications, nor does it happen with streaming apps other than Pandora, nor does it happen on any other device.”
In other words, Android users are less willing to pay for apps and device fragmentation remains a big issue.
Why Android Pay isn’t really about payments at all
Which means that it has a huge fragmentation problem staring it right in the face – a huge obstacle when trying to replicate an Apple-like strategy.
At its launch, Google announced that Android Pay would be supported on devices running KitKat and higher. That’s roughly 44 percent of Android enabled devices, and none of those that operate a forked version of Android, like the Amazon Fire phone, for instance or Samsung’s Tizen.
In the U.S., as of March 2015, comScore says that 187 million people own smartphones.
Android has a 52.4 percent of that market – so some 97 million phones run the Android operating system.
That actually beats Apple by a whole lot – like 17 million.
But only 44 percent of those handsets run a version of KitKat and higher. Less than 5 percent run Lollipop, its most current version.
That reduces the number of phones with KitKat or higher to roughly 42 million phones.
A rough guesstimate of how many of those 42 million are NFC enabled – and therefore ready to rock it with Android Pay – is 6 million. (In 2013, 18 percent of all handsets shipped were NFC enabled – and 80 percent of those were Android. So, 18 percent of 42 million and then 80 percent of that number is 6 million.)
How does Apple fare then?
Kantar’s latest reports say that 18 percent of the 80 million iPhones in the U.S. are 6’s – that’s 14.4 million phones ready and able to enable Apple Pay. That doesn’t translate to Apple Pay usage, we estimate the number of active users to be ~600k – but simply estimates the size of the addressable market for Apple Pay.
That means that out of the gate, Google Android Pay has about half (57 percent) of the addressable market that Apple Pay has.
But being able to use a particular payment mode doesn’t translate to actual spending power. So let’s look at spending power analysis.
According to Pew’s latest study of smartphone demographics- which was done before the iPhone 6 was released – and before all of the stats about Apple’s ability to attract “switchers” were too – the differences were stark.
31 percent of adults earning more than $75k owned a phone running an Android operating system, compared to 40 percent with Apple phones;
28 percent of adults earning under $30k own Android phones, compared to 18 percent with Apple phones;
29 percent of Android users are college educated, compared with 38 percent of Apple phone owners;
All of which suggests strongly that the commerce advantage goes to Apple.
Not only are there more Apple users in the upper income categories but more of them are concentrated in their peak spending years. In fact, we estimated a year or so ago, that roughly 66 percent of retail spend in the U.S. is driven by those who own iPhones.
So what drives Google to push for Android Pay then?
A New York Times article last week extracted data from a Goldman Sachs report on Google’s search revenue challenges. In it, it was reported that this year – 2015 – Google’s ad revenue will be split 58/23 desktop to mobile. In 2016, that’s expected to adjust further to 54/27. It isn’t hard to imagine that by 2020, those numbers will not only flip as “mobile” expands to become wearables, cars and a collection of other connected devices that consumers own and use but change entirely as search becomes less about using search engines and more about consumers using apps to find the things they want to buy.
That detail suddenly becomes pretty important since mobile ad revenue, on a good day, clocks in at a lot less than desktop revenues. More mobile search means less search revenue even if volume is increasing. All you have to do is review Google’s last couple of years of earnings reports to see the impact that it’s already having on its revenue.
The shift to mobile search poses a bigger threat when you look at the sources of these searches:
Approximately 75 percent of Google’s mobile search revenue is the result of people using iPhones and iPads to find things on their path to purchase. A search initiated via Safari is actually powered by Google.
I see it as a matter of when, not if, that Apple would replace the default search in Safari with another search engine, such as DuckDuckGo.