LG is launching a new Hi-Fi music service later this month, but the company’s not touting it as an Apple Music or a Spotify rival. After all, it will only be accessible through certain devices, particularly its premium phones, which likely includes the LG G4 and its predecessors, the G3 and the G2. The service will be available in 70 countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Russia, China and Italy.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why companies like LG, who aren’t exactly raking in massive profits from their smartphone sales, are wasting precious time and money on pointless nonsense like this. Nobody is going to use this, nobody is going to care, and within less than a few years, it will be shutdown.
What’s the point?
Thom, I couldn’t agree more; Korean phones (my experience in here in Korea) have so much pointless and redundant crapware… just today I lost it and tried to uninstall the latest iteration of their silly video service, which I don’t use, don’t want and didn’t request. The thing has an annoying habit of starting itself when you try to deactivate it and then stays on when you really want to throw it out of the nearest window… each day, the idea of rooting the thing becomes more appealing. Trouble is that they will only slip it back and reinstall it when you least suspect.
Ditto with that new ASUS Transformer I bought recently. Full of ASUS stuff which is redundant because I already have experience with other peoples’ wares (and which I actually prefer).
It would be great if you could just buy a basic phone or tablet with no extras, and just add what you want (they are Android, after all)… do they really think this is doing anyone a favour?
Nexus? Google Play Editions? Moto X Pure?
While buying Nexus or such from the get-go is the easiest way one could also just go to http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Devices#vendor=; and check if the device they’re interested in is supported by CM.
Eh, I used to say that. Cyanogen doesn’t offer the same support on all of the devices. It really depends on the device as to how quickly it will get updated. I’m kind of disappointed in the stability of cyanogen on my current nexus. And that’s on a NEXUS, which should be the easiest to code for.
I took “basic” and “Android” to mean a device with Google services baked in. If they want a more generic Android-compatible environment, then certainly your option is also a good choice.
I don’t think that is problem only for Korean smartphone manufacturers, but a common thing for most of Android device manufacturers.
It is pretty pointless. I see LG doing something, wich is lost before it’s even started.
Make an entry in Osnews… and any other media.
Is there really no such thing as bad publicity ? Any publicity is good publicity for some kind of people.
Edited 2015-08-13 11:52 UTC
Highly compromised music formats limit the bandwidth and limit the ability of the music to connect emotionally.
You might not know it or refuse to believe it, but you are getting 10% of the data that your parents got from their music. Even your grandparents probably enjoyed music with more true fidelity and human emotion in it than you do now.
Because it’s in your pocket doesn’t make you feel better. Because you have 9000 mp3 files doesn’t make you feel better. Because you can stream a million tracks doesn’t make you feel better. You think it does, it feels superior, but it’s just the opposite.
Hearing full quality music as the artist intended is what makes you feel better. You don’t know it until you try. Most modern people don’t even know there is a such thing as high quality audio, they truly think their phone is all their is, there is no better. It’s sad, the ignorance of sound.
*IF* this phone has a better DAC than a regular phone, and if it has a decent headphone amp in it, this could be a nice product.
Phones do everything these days, but they do very few things well. It’s about time makers started focusing on improving the quality of features, not just the count of features.
Edited 2015-08-13 12:30 UTC
Who are “modern people” ?
People who listen to something other than Diana Krall, insipid geezer jazz or whatever anesthetic binaural DSD crap Chesky records puts out.
Edited 2015-08-13 14:20 UTC
i know you aren’t talking about me, i listen to funk, rock, reggae, anything good that’s well written, well recorded, has a good vibe on it. i make music that defies categorization with all sorts of budget instruments. i listen to some modern stuff but a lot of it is tiring, it’s recorded for this mp3 world and it sounds very fatiguing to me.
i also don’t own any expensive playback gear.
the haters are the ones that think there is no better quality. they lie and say that only rich guys with pony tails that listen to jazz think there is higher quality. there is higher quality for everyone, your class warfare and ridicule does not apply to me. even apple recommends masters at 24bit so they can compress down to the ‘closest’ quality to the original. the original is the highest quality.
it isn’t that regular people can’t afford audio quality in 2015, it’s that they don’t even understand it exists because of all the ignorance about our ears and how we intake music.
Edited 2015-08-14 16:50 UTC
modern people:
people born in the internet age that possess a basic technical ability and believe any digital format is as good or better quality as the analog it seeks to recreate.
Spotted the delusional audiophile.
You may have different opinions about music, but you don’t have a license to judge other people’s feelings. No one does. If people are happy with the music they have, believe them. If they connect emotionally over music that’s compressed down to a mono 96 kbps mp2, that’s not for you to tell them they aren’t or their emotions aren’t valid.
that’s true, i don’t really care if you enjoy compressed files. but know that there’s much more out there, and musicians and music producers work hard to impart that magic in recorded music, and phones playing 10% files ruin just about all of it.
audio = when digital-minded people go backwards. less is more all of a sudden.
Reading your post induced more fatigue than any amount of digital audio jitter ever could.
Digital denial. Enjoy your 10%. Explore higher quality when you are ready. Maybe when your TV has 18 million pixels you’ll be ready to think about audio.
I spent about $300 on my DAP and it sounds far better than your phone, your laptop, your desktop, or your iPod on just about every speaker system invented.
Most of you have been listening in a paper box for so long you don’t even know you are in it.
Edited 2015-08-14 16:55 UTC
…”I cannot understand why companies like LG, who aren’t exactly raking in massive profits from their smartphone sales, are wasting precious time and money on pointless nonsense like this.”…
Most likely, LG didn’t waste money on this. I’d be willing to bet the music industry (or some specific partner of the industry) has helped bank-roll the project, or did most of the heavy-lifting and then offered the service to LG in return for a kickback of the streaming royalties / ad revenue.
I think the music industry prefers streaming, it’s more like their traditional Radio format, and it’s not something that is as easy for end-consumers to pirate. It raises the barrier for copying and sharing the songs compared to CDs and downloadable formats (all of which can be hacked / transcoded / etc.) and helps insulate their distribution channel, promotional efforts, etc. The industry loves streaming — because it’s a model they understand.
Consumers kinda like it too, as you don’t need some ginormous amount of memory in your device to store all the music you’ll ever want, and you don’t have to spend hours and hours trying to attain all that music.
I doubt LG did most of this work, and I’d expect more identical services to start popping up on other manufacturers phones — probably propped up by the same ‘partner company’.
I didn’t care for streaming until I ended up getting a monstrous data plan that I’ve never hit the limit with, due to working remote sometimes in strange places without wi-fi.
Haven’t we learned from Internet Explorer and Apple Maps that it doesn’t matter what kind of software you offer. As long as it is the default people will use it, even if it is not what they were used to, if what they were used to is better, and if the public-opinion/media/geeks are against it.
avgalen,
Don’t know why I couldn’t upvote you, but how true!
The power of defaults is enormous. Whatever software MS or Apple include will get immediate marketshare just because of the bundling. It’s a huge advantage, even for a bad product. Something has to be very bad before many people will switch (and even then many don’t as with your examples)
This is partly why antitrust looks down on bundling, it hurts alternatives even when there is choice. Of course it’s even more egregious when there is no choice.
Edited 2015-08-13 17:43 UTC