I think you&#x27;re missing the point. Consumers don&#x27;t care, until some listicle website or advertising firm points out that Amazon&#x2F;Apple short you on your mp3s by not even offering 128kbps all the way through.<p>Or imagine Amazon goes with pure VBR, then Apple makes an ad claiming their sound quality is &quot;better&quot; because their bitrate never dips below 128kbps. It&#x27;s bullshit, but how is an average consumer suppose to figure this out? They&#x27;ll probably err on the side of caution and buy the CBR version since, &quot;it can&#x27;t be any worse than the VBR one, but I don&#x27;t lose bits and it&#x27;s the same price!&quot;<p>The whole article was talking about streaming vs. downloading. Streaming is _fine_ and Netflix will probably get away with their compression, but will Amazon&#x2F;Apple be able to do that with downloads? He doesn&#x27;t think so. People are fine with Spotify&#x2F;Pandora because there is no perceived ownership of the songs they&#x27;re streaming. People who actually buy and download audio or video, they have money in the game so they want &quot;the best&quot; and any loss of that is viewed as Amazon&#x2F;Apple screwing them over.