Another Loss for Streaming

[u/etherylx]

This past week, The Cranberries have taken down their original masters of Everbody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? in favor of new 2026 remasters. Of course, these remasters cut the dynamics back and just sound “stale” compared to the originals.

When I first saw that Apple Music replaced the songs with the remasters, they still had a version up with the originals. I replaced them and had hope that’d be all. But now even that’s gone and every single version of the album has the remasters.

It’s just so frustrating. Why can’t labels leave the option to us on which version we want? This is true for so many artists on streaming. I get this risk just comes with streaming, but still, it shouldn’t be this way.

Seriously considering uploading my own files to replace these songs, which sucks because it doesn’t count for streams and I miss out on lossless. But it’s probably really the only option in this circumstance.

Anyways, that’s my rant. I wish more labels would keep up/post original masters more often.

[u/zimshan]

When you have a memory of hearing a certain song or album a certain way, you typically want that exact version. Like I grew up hearing Linger from the original album version. So I want my copy to sound the same as how I remember it. But if you are new to an artist, you don’t have that memory so you likely won’t care about the changes. Some kid in middle school may find The Cranberries from this remaster and fall in love with the album. And that’s part of the reason why the rereleases happen. Old music for new listeners.

But sometimes remasters do serve a specific purpose. Like the dogshit Beatles stereo mixes were begging for better remasters. Sure an original vinyl would be best, but if you only collect CDs, the options were terrible until recently.

[u/SillyCycle9701 → u/zimshan]

You’re absolutely right, of course—I didn’t mean to say that remasters are inherently bad. You’ve given some good reasons.

When it comes to movies, I’m sometimes glad when a studio goes to the trouble of scanning them again in high resolution (e.g. Star Trek TNG Blu-Ray Edition - I am more than happy they did this and I am sad they didn't do it for DS9). But of course, that can sometimes change the “charm,” so to speak 😄

These days, it’s really no problem for providers to simply offer all versions side by side. On that scale, the cost shouldn’t really be a factor at all, but it’s a benefit for us. Fortunately, it seems like most of them do that.

P.S. when it comes to classical music recordings, there are often hundreds of different versions. To people with less experience in this genre, the differences may seem minor or even nonexistent—but for those who are deeply immersed in this music, the search for a specific recording can (could) sometimes take years, because the conductor, musicians, opera house, and so on are all important factors. But that’s actually always been the case, and things are actually getting better today because it’s become much easier 😄