The Pop Corporation

Given that 70% of the world uses Android, Apple are a strange phenomena given that, being the primary operating service in the States, it has a particularly loud voice in the marketing world. Of course, Apple fans are so sewn into the iOS mainframe that they can’t conceive of a world outside itself (which is largely fine, that’s not a dig per se) – but it’s particularly interesting when Apple make a statement of intent.

With Spotify being the big player in the world of music streaming, and Apple Music being something of a minnow (albeit a minnow in second place), Apple have decided to fire a shot at Spotify, in a peculiar way.

Apple are encouraging musicians to release music in spatial audio. What is spatial audio? It’s a gimmicky audio thing that’s akin to forced 3D that we saw in ’80s cinema. Again, it’s not a bad thing – gimmicks are fun. However, Apple are going all-in, and they’ve basically said that they’ll offer greater weight to artists who mix their music in spatial audio when it comes to appearing in search results.

What that means, in reality, is that big artists might try and rush through some spatial audio mixes on Apple Music, in a bid to wrangle some extra royalties. This may work in the States, but outside of the USA, Spotify doesn’t support spatial audio, so it largely doesn’t matter. Apple fans may think ‘well, North America counts for more’, but given that the largest markets are outside of the States and even Europe, you imagine the Chinese, Korean and South American markets are going to be largely unmoved by the whole thing.

Naturally, this isn’t a move that’s necessarily for the good of music. It’s to try and flog more headphones and whatnot. Headphones that create an illusion of three-dimensional sound when you move your head.

It’s not unlike Dolby Atmos, which didn’t really make a huge dent in the average listener’s life. It has to be said Apple doesn’t open it’s technology up to the rest of the market – and remember how that worked for Sony in the ’90s? If you’re someone who likes to buy a variety of products, rather than being in one ecosystem, then chances are, Apple’s developments won’t make a jot of difference to your listening or viewing habits.

Also, we have to add that this is almost like the most boring and mostly inaccurate conversations about music quality. Most listeners can’t tell the difference between CD quality and your average MP3 file. The people that tell you that they can, by and large, are trying to justify the expensive speakers they’ve just bought, or the daft headphones they got roped into buying.

Music tech sorts are a niche group anyway, so basically, none of this matters at all.

And even Apple’s Eddy Cue – senior vice president of services and the person who oversees Apple Music – agrees. Talking to Billboard, he 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.” In blind tests, he added: “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.”

It seems, the push for spatial audio is because, thanks to it being gimmicky, it’s the most noticeable difference to the listening experience. Gimmicks are fun, but they’re not essential. And will the small bands who don’t have the resources to re-release albums bother with this? You can’t imagine they will, as streaming royalties aren’t worth the effort when you get a better return for selling merch online, or further up the food chain, doing product placement in a promo video.

There’s a number of examples of spatial audio songs on an official Apple playlist that sound pretty fun, but an equal number that are very obviously a lesser listening experience.

For a company with a smaller market share, with a walled set of technology and apps, it’s a peculiar thing to hang your hat on, but rest assured, there’ll be a bunch of existing Apple fans who will be thrilled, so bully for them, we guess.

Bring back mono, we say.