nope. Amazon is outstanding if comes to speed of physical delivery of ordered goods.
The movie section is a desaster already. you easily can spent 5mins until you found what you were looking for. Ok, since being a movie you might get served with 120mins playlength then.
Audio looks even worse but movies, you can easily spend 10 times 5 mins for searching while not getting a single match, mean 100% loss of time for simply nothing.
Coverage to be put in question
next to nothing in ultra HD
the few ones flagged ultra HD in 99% 24/48 … means lowest possible one
some of the albums flagged ultra HD are in reality 16/44.1 when being played (information about the files not the local audio device capabilities)
then there’s albums which simply do contain 0 tracks in total (Quboz suffers that issue in th beginning)
Perhaps it’s a good idea to pre-test something inhouse before going public.
And perhaps Jeff should ask himself if the
in-ear-eqipped, chartlist-driven, singletrack oriented mobile walkaroundies are the ones which would like to be extra charged for a higher quality, or if there’s chances that a second category of music listeners might exist willing to do so, in case one fullfills their aspects.
Booklets, reviews, artist information, ability to filter against wasting an afternoon browsing though unwanted crap…
You can easily make poeple pay for something special but sure not just for being informed about Jeff’s capabilities in having been able to copy a 16/44.1 flac file on top of an old existing 320Kbit mp3 and cried out “yeah we invented unlimited HD now”
And I doubt that time is the limiting factor … it’s more something to do with understanding about different types of customers.
Artists make more money if you buy their product. The sale of vinyl or CD’s gives them the highest profit margin. Next up is downloading digital media. But where artists get absolutely taken to the cleaners is with streaming. Streaming gives the artist a fraction of a penny (slightly more than 0.01 cents for each stream on the high end) . Of all the streaming companies, TIDAL (owned by Jay-Z) pays the artist moret per stream second only to Napster!! If you love music, BUY IT. If that is not your choice, at least stream from a service that does better by the artist.
Slightly off topic but I emailed Qobuz about lack of certain albums and competition from Amazon. They replied back with a very personalized email and gave a link to live presentation their US managing director was giving on hires albums and what Qobuz was doing different.
In their presentation they did mention how hopefully Amazon’s HD offering was like a big wave that will lift up all the streaming services but kind of hard if one was twice as heavy. Said to expect an announcement from them about that in about 3 months. I can expect that to mean a price drop.
They made no mention of roon but was shown on their partner sites and said this is their biggest way of expanding. The partners promote each other.
So anyway, looks like Amazon is already providing healthy competition that will hopefully lead Qobuz to a price drop. And if these partnerships really work, Amazon will see it’s worth their time to jump on board.
First let me state that I know nothing about the internal pricing discussions, deals, or negotiations at Qobuz, Amazon, Tidal, or anywhere else.
What I do know from first hand experience is that the major music labels control the price a streaming service charges. One can negotiate with them, but fundamentally, they hold all the cards. No one has any real leverage. Not even Apple. Now, Amazon clearly got this cheaper rate by being a major player to offer something “new”. I don’t know what they did to get that, but I can imagine all the other lossless services are sending a “WTF?” email to the labels.
Business moves slooooow. Let’s see what the pricing ends up at.
Maybe Amazon is operating their HD music business with little or no margins to build up their customer base. Maybe their intent is to use their HD music business to sell Amazon hardware. Of course, that would mean absolutely no Roon integration.
My point is Amazon would have no incentive to integrate with Roon if they were simply trying to sell their own proprietary hardware. If they have priced Amazon HD at a low margin, there would be little to no reason to add a bunch of “break-even” customers who already have Roon enabled hardware.
I don’t have any idea that’s what they are doing, but we don’t know that’s not what they are doing. I think the question was why is their product priced as low as it is? I simply stated a possible explanation.
There is something to be said for paying a tad more to support a service like Qobuz that is more supportive of services you want to use. They also let me buy when I want to at 24 bit and not just MP3.
Amazon are prepared to place a big bet and make losses on it for years to come if necessary. It’s about the long term.
Given their focus on customer experience am sure they will realise there are further development requirements in this latest offering that need working on.
At least we know Roon integration is quite some way off… if at all
I would happily stay with Qobuz if they could get their price down to something close. It’s a good service. If Amazon becomes available via Roon though, the price difference is just too big not to jump ship, sadly.
Well if they knock out Tidal,Qobuz or both who have had well documented financial troubles,I will play with the shark.
Amazon can afford losses . Im not sure that Tidal or Qobuz can and they will probably have to drop their price on top of that.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
621
Well, if it’s anything like buying product as a prime member, Amazon users will try to play a track, then receive an email that due to problems beyond Amazon’s control, the track won’t be ready to play until Tuesday, and then on Tuesday it will play a different track by an artist with a similar name, and then you will have to get on a chat with someone in India and wade through 10 canned messages before you get to try to explain how you didn’t get what you ordered. In the end, they will credit you with the equivalent of 10% of the track.
So I’ve seen Amazon update their iPhone app twice in the last few days. I finally got a chance to try it and the sample rate issue is still not fixed.
This was where it sends the highest upsampled rate to your dac but shows current rate in app. Think most will never notice the problem unless your dac tells you the true rate you’re receiving.