{"id":939,"date":"2014-03-03T01:01:37","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T06:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marcurselli.com\/?p=939"},"modified":"2014-03-03T23:01:59","modified_gmt":"2014-03-04T04:01:59","slug":"the-truth-about-music-streaming-services-and-the-ultimate-audio-quality-shootout-test-beats-vs-mog-vs-play-music-by-google-vs-rdio-vs-spotify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marcurselli.com\/blog\/the-truth-about-music-streaming-services-and-the-ultimate-audio-quality-shootout-test-beats-vs-mog-vs-play-music-by-google-vs-rdio-vs-spotify\/","title":{"rendered":"The TRUTH about MUSIC Streaming Services and the ULTIMATE AUDIO QUALITY shootout test: Beats vs MOG vs Play Music (by Google) vs Rdio vs Spotify"},"content":{"rendered":"

After wondering for years which of the big music streaming services truly sounds the best, I decided to take matters into my own hands (I mean, EARS!) and do a SCIENTIFIC audio quality test.\u00a0This is NOT a subjective test where I or somebody else listened and I judged what they thought might be better or worse.\u00a0This is COLD HARD DATA, to be precise KiloBits Per Seconds (kbps) of data transfer and MegaBytes (Mb) of downloads. But fear not!!! I will keep the results super easy to understand and you won’t need a degree in anything to know who to pick. I can’t however promise you that you won’t be disappointed when finding out how these streaming companies have been lying to us all along about the sound quality they promise. NO MORE! With actual and factual numbers at hand I will tell you who sounds best and who delivers on their promises and you will be able to make an informed decision knowing that you are supporting the company that supports the BEST SOUNDING audio and that you are not paying full price for half the quality!<\/p>\n

By the way, I plan to do a lot more of these tests, so if you are interested in findings such as these or in the music industry in general, make sure you follow me on Twitter<\/strong> at @marcurselli<\/a> or at facebook.com\/marcurselli<\/a><\/p>\n

Without further ado, here we go…<\/p>\n

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The Problem<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"iPhone<\/a><\/span>I am still very much torn on whether to support streaming music services at all or not. Although I do of course support the idea of paying for music, the current payment distribution methods employed by these streaming services are NOT based on actual play counts and do NOT serve (or even fairly compensate) independent artists. These artists therefore absolutely cannot rely on income from these services (more on that at the end of this article) and a lot of even famous artists (like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, David Byrne, John Zorn, AC\/DC, Led Zeppelin and many others) understood that and took steps to get their music off of streaming services. Should you want to take such steps you will have to rely on a company such as Muso<\/a> for example.<\/p>\n

This said, in these times when everyone is streaming music from the cloud, if you are a music lover, it is almost impossible not to rely on one of these services for music discovery and because my no.1 concern when it comes to online music streaming is THE QUALITY I decided to set up the THE ULTIMATE AUDIO QUALITY TEST to find out which of these services actually deliver the BEST SOUNDING music. Period.<\/p>\n

Back when there was only Spotify<\/strong> and MOG<\/strong> to choose from, I myself chose\u00a0MOG<\/strong> because they were the only company that even bothered to mentioned streaming quality and they always claimed that they streamed at the highest quality. I\u00a0have been a\u00a0MOG<\/strong>\u00a0user for a few years now. At that same time\u00a0I had approached Rdio<\/strong> and asked about streaming quality. They claimed they were “streaming music at\u00a0CD-quality, and only do lower bit rates over 3G” but when I asked for a more technical answer all I got was “I’m sorry, but we’re not sharing this information”. I honestly do not understand why a company that promises a quality service would not provide customers with all the information about the service and the quality they are promising.\u00a0Usually corporate secrecy is synonymous with wrongdoing and this lack of transparency was a huge turn off for me. So I passed on Rdio<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2014.\u00a0MOG<\/strong> has been acquired by Dr. Dre’s Beats Music<\/strong> and is going to shut down on April 14th. The new\u00a0Beats Music<\/strong> is already available and is getting good reviews because of its curatorial aspect, but I was never a fan of the Beats headphones (although I have not tested all the high-end models) and if that was their idea of good sound quality I was afraid I was going to be disappointed with their streaming quality. I went ahead and tested all the most popular music streaming services available today, which include the ever popular Spotify<\/strong>, the disappearing\u00a0MOG<\/strong>, the new\u00a0Beats Music<\/strong>, the underdog Rdio<\/strong> and the relatively new kid on the block Play Music<\/strong> (by Google<\/strong>). I have decided not to include iTunes Radio, Rhapsody or Pandora because they are the kind of apps that don’t allow you to listen to a specific song or artist (you can only create stations based around an artist).<\/p>\n

This test will ONLY and specifically be about QUALITY of audio<\/strong>, not about user interface, number of songs or other factors. There are plenty of reviews out there for that and I’ve added links to some of those at the bottom of this page for your convenience.<\/p>\n

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The Method<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0\"iPhone<\/a><\/p>\n

In order to ensure realistic and reproducible results I tried to be as scientific as I could about this.
\nLike so:<\/p>\n