The headline is true under the assumption that music downloads are only for listening to. But it is a tremendous loss to forget about downstream processing, e.g. remixes &c., which <i>will</i> want extra bit-depth:<p>> An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering. Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations. The quantization noise and noise floor of a 16 bit sample may be undetectable during playback, but multiplying that noise by a few thousand times eventually becomes noticeable. 24 bits keeps the accumulated noise at a very low level. Once the music is ready to distribute, there's no reason to keep more than 16 bits.<p>192 kHz less practically useful, but for the time being is still a useful signal as to the target audience.<p>If all that mattered were playback, lossless 16/44.1 would be almost as silly compared to distributing only with lossy compression. The space savings of, say, 128 kbps opus, surely outweigh the few audible difference that nobody will even notice without a comparison, right?
I'm a big fan of getting final exports at whatever the studio recorded the multitrack at. For fully digital music, meaning, fully in a DAW with synthetic almost everything, please give me the highest bit depth and sample rate. For old music, don't bother, classic rock or stuff like that, a high bit version would just be somebody "remastering" it and faking quality where there never was any. I don't understand the space argument for this either nor do I get the reaching in comparison to wavelength of light and video capture. It's simple, if the studio recorded everything in 32/192 then at least make a 24/96 available for download and purchase.