it's the social features and the network effect. if you want to make a playlist and share it with your friends the easiest way to get them to listen to it is to host it on spotify. also blends, collaborative playlist, jams, and now listening all provide the illusion of connection through a shared listening experience. and it's not so much that these things are better than what we used to have for sharing music, it's that corporations have all killed our ways of sharing music. that's what they really hated about groove shark. artists made more money in the groove shark era, but umg, sony, and warner didn't control how we shared on it.

Yeah seriously; unless you're an audiophile who spends extra on quality headphones, your Bluetooth buds are probably using the SBC codec, which cuts off frequencies at 16kHz and thus is hardly better than listening to a 128Kbps MP3. (In Android you can see what codec your headphones are using by going into the developer options.)

And to be honest, if you care enough about sound quality to spend extra on the high res tier in your streaming service of choice, you're probably using wired headphones. Audiophiles don't fuck with Bluetooth.

It's actually worse than lossless being discernable or not on bluetooth - people cannot reliably tell between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio generally. This has been studied to oblivion - the jury is out, there's no more discussion to be had on the subject.

Just the other day I was listening to the new Linkin Park album on Spotify in a car with a friend (no fancy speaker system)

We both thought it sounded kinda low quality so we switched to youtube and the improvement was instantly noticable to us. Spotify just sucks. At least if you are used to HQ audio

Just switched from iPhone to Android. If your Bluetooth headphones support aptx you can definitely hear the difference