I had been noticing something in a few albums I was listening to in iTunes and Spotify lately (particularly classical music recordings), an irritating "tremolo" effect as if someone had a fan running in front of the speakers (or a strong tape flutter). I initially thought it might be due to the compression Spotify uses but noticed the same thing in the identical recording on iTunes (which should be higher quality).
It turns out the audio effect is a form of "watermarking" intentionally put there by music labels owned by Universal Music Group to better track where their music is going. I suppose streaming audio subscriptions might not be expected to offer super audiophile quality, but to have an artist's recording intentionally contaminated like this is pretty lame- and it's REALLY noticeable. This artifact will also be there when someone pays for a full price album on iTunes, as well as high resolution "lossless" albums from legitimate websites. Only CDs and the downloads offered directly from the label's websites don't have the watermark.
http://www.mattmontag.com/music/univ...ible-watermark
I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be more of an uproar over this- the watermarking deteriorates the audio far more noticeably than any conversion from an audio master to an high bitrate MP3. Perhaps in many cases people just don't notice?
Here's a listening test in which you can determine how well you can hear it:
http://mattmontag.com/audio-listening-test/
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