You are probably right, but I take OP as metaphorically speaking.
Recently I went to a local orchestra performance, and I was absolutely blown away by the sound. It was overwhelming in a way spotify never is. It was like a full body experience. I’ve been to the orchestra before, but it’s been a few years and I just forgot how powerful music can be.
Kinda like how most people listen to low quality audio streams, on low quality earbuds/soundbars. Hell, I torrented a video recently because it wasn’t available to buy, and again, was blown away because the quality was so high compared to the streaming I pay for. I think in general, we’re all just becoming used to the mediocre.
Well, it's important to differentiate what actually matters in cases like this otherwise we just get into a weird luddite place of complaining about things that don't actually matter.
Here it is the listening medium and environment where an orchestra hall is a physical building built at a cost many orders of magnitude more expensive than speakers specifically for the experience of listening to live music compared to listening to something on a home speaker or phone.
To me It's interesting that you assume Spotify is the problem, whereas its actually the listening medium you are using Spotify through. In the case of audio, you could listen to Spotify recordings on sound systems that will basically blow you away in the same way a live orchestra will, but they cost probably 10's of thousands of dollars. For example at the higher-end of setups people describe it being hard to differentiate between concert recordings and actual concerts, and this should be expected with what we know about audio.
I do agree though that quality degradation as a means of meeting cost and false-repackaging of that as higher quality is annoying. Especially in streaming video, things are advertised as 4K, but that ignores bitrate and we have the potential infrastructure to deliver experiences that are way better like streaming the equivalent bitrate of a Bluray, but we've kind of fallen into a place of "good enough" where most people don't know or appreciate what is possible. Audio is kind of similar, but there is maybe more of an argument that cost of listening systems means we're at a happy-medium of cost vs. quality and you can pretty much buy the level of experience you want there.
Recently I went to a local orchestra performance, and I was absolutely blown away by the sound. It was overwhelming in a way spotify never is. It was like a full body experience. I’ve been to the orchestra before, but it’s been a few years and I just forgot how powerful music can be.
Kinda like how most people listen to low quality audio streams, on low quality earbuds/soundbars. Hell, I torrented a video recently because it wasn’t available to buy, and again, was blown away because the quality was so high compared to the streaming I pay for. I think in general, we’re all just becoming used to the mediocre.