Eddy Cue is head of Apple Music, and in a surprising revelation, he admitted not being able to tell the difference between standard streaming and lossless audio.
This is a shocking thing to say after Apple Music’s new lossless audio functionality was added to the streaming platform earlier this month, as it seems the company are playing down renovations made to their own streaming platform.
Although, its suspected that this comment about lossless audio is actually a dig at the company’s competitors such as Spotify and TIDAL who both also recently introduced lossless audio, but charge their users for the upgrade to their service.
Apple instead added the lossless streaming free of charge, and seem to be implying that for the average person lossless audio is a service not worth paying for.
When discussing lossless streaming, Eddy Cue said: “The reality of lossless is: if you take 100 people and you take a stereo song in lossless and you take a song that’s been in Apple Music that’s compressed, I don’t know if it’s 99 or 98 can’t tell the difference.”
He continued: “I can’t tell personally – I do the blind tests all the time with the team – I can’t tell. That’s a problem. That’s not going to work because that’s a marketing play, not a true customer play.
“The problem with lossless is you can tell somebody, ‘Oh, you’re listening to a lossless [song],’ and they tell you, ‘Oh, wow. That sounds incredible.’ They’re just saying it because you told them it’s lossless and it sounds like the right thing to say, but you just can’t tell.”
In the same conversation with Billboard, Eddy Cue was far more positive about the future of Spatial Audio, which Apple also added to their platform earlier this month, saying: “I think this is going to take over everything,” then continued. “It’s the way I want to listen to music when I’m in my car. It’s going to be the way I listen to music immediately with my AirPods. It’s going to be the way I listen to music in my house.”
You can watch the below video if you want to find out how to activate Spatial and Lossless Audio with Apple Music.
H/T: Billboard
