But some people demand more. Audiophiles spend thousands every year on high-end equipment that delivers an experience as close as possible to having Beyoncé there in person belting out "ALL THE SINGLE LADIES." These people tend to be choosy about their formats – vinyl is the best, of course. CDs aren't bad either if you're playing them through a decent system.
But the majority of digital music is out of the window – the historical necessity for small file sizes has meant that download and streaming services tend to opt for "lossy" compression (such as the MP3 format) that strips out the bits of the song that most people can't hear. So a few enterprising businesses have launched in recent years to sell or stream high-definition digital music to those who claim to be able to hear the difference.
"I would speculate that Tidal is the biggest [high-definition music] service around," says Darren Hemmings from digital marketing agency Motive Unknown.
Hemmings is not wrong. Tidal is the streaming music company that was spun off from WiMP and launched in the US and UK in October 2014. It is a service that's been shoved into the limelight, thanks to a buyout by Jay Z and a recent swish celeb-infused relaunch.
"The first time I listened to Tidal it blew my mind. I was totally sold," says Andy Malt, editor of music business news service CMU. "I was sitting at my desk thinking, I'm going to have to work out some way to afford to pay for this, because I can't go back now. Then I thought, 'Better just compare it to Spotify first.' So I switched between the two and realised I couldn't actually hear any difference at all."
Deezer is a French-based streaming company, which has long battled to differentiate itself from market leader Spotify, and recently partnered with Sonos for a high-definition offering called Elite that went live in the US in September 2014 and should go live globally in March 2015.
With news that Tidal is also now available on Sonos, Deezer better have some canny advertising campaign ready to compete with images of Daft Punk quaffing champagne with Coldplay at Tidal's relaunch.
Making MP3s for dogs
Malt was even less impressed with Pono than Tidal, saying: "[Neil Young] is selling digital music to people who don't understand digital music, or just like the idea of giving Neil Young money. All streaming services will increase their quality as it becomes possible to deliver it reliably. At which point, we'll all be laughing at the people who paid £20 for one album in a format that places most of its sound outside the spectrum of human hearing. He's making MP3s for dogs, basically."
Sony is another company with its sights firmly fixed on hi-def audio. While pushing hi-res audio playback in its latest generation of products (which use LDAC, its own wireless audio codec) it has taken the somewhat silly step of releasing a microSD card "for Premium Sound." Which on the face of it is the equivalent of asking consumers to spend hundreds on an HDMI cable – the quality improvements are very negligible.
The big questions, therefore, are who's winning the battle for the audiophile market, and does that victory mean anything? "Tidal and Pono would appear to be the market leaders," says Malt, "But no one has ever made it big in hi-def music. It will never be mainstream unless it's offered as standard." Hemmings also points to Tidal as the current market leader, and adds: "I feel the press that Pono has received is disproportionate to its actual adoption among consumers."
It is this standardisation that has meant that much of the industry is happy to play the waiting game until there is more openness in standards and services.
"We welcome 24-bit streaming," says Keith Robertson, Technical Director of high-end audio manufacturer Linn. "But as an industry we need to come to the point of openness that happened to the web in the mid-90s. Where no matter what client you are using, you can get all the music. We need to stop having locked out systems."
Robertson believes that we will see a more open service arrive later in 2015 but until that time Linn's mantra will always be: "We support any codec that is open and widely used". Unfortunately this is a rarity when it comes to high-definition audio files.
Hi-res heavyweights
The problem for many high-definition services is that Spotify or Apple could easily pump up their quality settings one day and wipe out the hi-def niche in one fell swoop. "Unlike in the physical age, it doesn't really require much investment, because most streaming services are getting files delivered as WAVs anyway. They just need to encode the catalogue they already have and tell people it's worth more," says Malt.
Hemmings adds that while the iPhone today can't play anything beyond CD quality music, there's no reason to believe that won't change in the future. "Everything I have read about Apple of late suggests that their focus is on the streaming marketplace first and foremost – ie competing with, and hopefully beating, Spotify for market share. If that is the case then hi-def audio simply wouldn't be top of their list right now. Could it be served in due course though? Absolutely – at which point Apple is every bit as threatening to any hi-def music service as it is to Spotify at present."
