Also on the topic of trying to push the compact disc to its limits a Grindcore group who had a bonus track where "All efforts were made to exceed typical limitations of 16 bit linear digital technology compression, limiting, and equalization curves have been created to deliver maximum gain structure"
I had a period of bad luck in my youth where I believed all these new enhanced CD's and shaped CD's were damaging the tracking of the lens on my CD player so I gave Exit-13 a swerve and started to listen to safer music ;)
What is the maximum bit rate for mixcloud mixes? The audio quality of anything I upload sounds terribly degraded especially when I share it with someone who is not signed in
Depends on if you are on free or Pro account as the uploader, if you are on Pro we up the bitrate substantially. Beyond this, it also depends on the device the user is listening on, we'll switch over to Opus when possible, which makes a big difference. If you want to max out the quality I would recommend you get Pro and ensure you listen on Chrome (or mobile apps). We'll do up to 320k on aac and 192k on opus. On Live we do something similar and last time I checked we did substantially higher rates than twitch on audio, but lower bitrates on the video.
I find this argument interesting though I have found that the same Jungle music I listened to in the 90s is now cutting edge again similar to around 2007 when 80s Italo House was considered the most stylish and hippest thing to listen to.
One out of ~10 international shipments of records I had in the last year one was from FedEx and they sat on it in their out for delivery warehouse in a nearby town for two months with the usual pass the buck/pillar to post treatment. The extra fees plus customs they put on added up to 40% of the value of the items as well. DHL and UPS arrive within a week and are normally no higher than 25%
FedEx seems to be the worst option domestically too. Maybe it depends on your location but they're the only service that somehow fails to deliver signature required packages to my mail room. I've also tried to have them contact me directly while I wait at home and I've tried to waive the signature requirement online, but they still just say "delivery attempted" for 3 consecutive days and then hold stuff at their warehouse. Happened to me twice recently. I now try to avoid buying anything expensive that uses FedEx to ship.
A funny thing I discovered in this process is that "delivery instructions" are shared for all packages to a given address regardless of the associated name, and never flushed unless you go in and do it manually on their website. I found the name and contact information for the prior tenant of my unit on the FedEx site with no other info besides 1 tracking number to the address (it also let me change the delivery instructions with said info). Potentially they were still calling that person when they tried to deliver initially, though I have other reasons to doubt they actually came to the door that day.
Yes wanting to preserve musical history or be able to recall something you once liked probably falls into the rockist vs poptimist debate. Even listening to tracks in the order they were intended is either radical or primitive to the defenders of streaming.
At the time this was declared as a user base driven acquisition where Conde Nast assumed that the largely 20 to mid 30s male readership of Pitchfork would graduate to one of their traditional style publications once they came of age. Clearly it was misguided to assume that cash strapped college grads who grew up on mp3's and ramen would graduate to Eames chairs and Zegna fleeces without some VC backed lottery payout.
However, the majority of money is made with the major acts. Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, etc.. They are the main revenue drivers.
Royalty free music improves the bottom line only marginally, which is still substantial for an established company like Spotify where small changes in margins count, but it's not revolutionary to the market.
