The worse problem for YouTube Music is that some of the source material is not the same as what you may have on physical media. There are entire labels that provide worse or at least different materials than they published to record stores. And then there is remaster roulette. What am I going to hear if I press play on "Rumours": the original that was born perfect, or one of the half-dozen remasters that have been issued as the original engineer progressively loses his hearing?
Yeah, the ADM certified stuff, as far as I know, is a small percentage of the music on there. The distributors I've worked with don't let you have a separate Apple Music version in the same release (a lot of them don't even let you pick which stores it goes to, it's just bulk submit everywhere), so it's extra work and/or cost to make an AM specific version. And only the top mastering talent seem to be ADM certified- I don't see many advertising it (some do). I figure if an ADM master is made, that one is submitted everywhere, but it's really a minority of the releases. Most of them maybe conform to it by happenstance by way of just making a nice sounding master, but I'm not aware of Apple rejecting loud releases, for example. You can submit a song mastered at +6 LUFS but they will just turn it down when someone plays it.
Apple Digital Masters indeed recommends no clipping. But the program is based on Apple interviewing the process that to-be-certified mastering engineers use. There is a way where you can pass the interview, get certified and then decide that clipping sounds better/louder/whatever and the file will still get the ADM stamp.
This is unfortunately the case on other platforms like Spotify too. :(
Due to what I assume are music licensing oddities, one song in my Spotify now has an entirely different singer. It was taken down for a while, then later reuploaded as a new recording with new vocals. I’ve also seen copies of my songs changing to remix/cover versions, presumably due to metadata adjustments by the artists. Although usually I can re-search and find the original, adding it back to my library.
A few songs just have new outros/intros. One song in my library now has an additional several seconds of silence on the end. One has a new longer intro that I think is really from the music video version of the song.
As convenient as these music services are, I hate that my library changes beneath me without my control. There are dozens of songs just straight up missing from my Spotify library now. And a small handful that have changed audio. These are almost always in indie songs, and Spotify just hides deleted songs by default in the UI so most users don’t notice.
One of my favorite albums of the last year [0] has had its 5 tracks split into 3 parts each on streaming platforms. It’s kinda weird, but I assume it’s because of the way streaming services pay per track and not per second played.
This affects all digital stores. Many labels appear to have lost their uncompressed masters, especially for stuff that was released on the internet in the early 2000s. I regularly catch them pants down when trying to buy something through digital music stores as lossless and I receive a FLAC file that shows clear signs of MP3 compression. It usually results in a refund from the store in question. For this reason I'm buying less and less through those stores, and try to hunt down cheap used CD copies instead, if at all possible.
I started this process for all the major labels in 1999. For the five years I was involved it was just "here's the CD, do your best, we don't have easy access to anything better than this. good luck." We ripped to WAV so we could re-encode as each new tech came out.
