Apple is offering to pay artists more money if they provideApple Musicwith versions of their songs recorded in the immersiveDolby Atmos Musicformat,according to a report from Bloomberg. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense, especially as Apple lays the groundwork for itssoon-to-launchApple Vision Pro headset, a device that will benefit greatly from immersive audio. But the move also could create exactly the wrong set of incentives at a time when the jury is still split over whether spatial audio for music actually is a good thing.
Apple has spent the past several years ramping up its support for spatial audio in general andDolby Atmosspecifically, through its AirPods family of wireless headphones, itsApple TV 4Kstreaming device, and virtually all of its computing products, too. Apple Music has a growing catalog of tracks in Dolby Atmos Music, and the Apple TV+ video streaming service offers Dolby Atmos soundtracks on nearly all of its movies and shows.
But while Dolby Atmos for movies is typically seen as a big enhancement of the movie-watching experience, the same isn’t necessarily true of Dolby Atmos Music. The reasons are myriad.
It’s not entirely clear that people want their favorite songs to be presented with the added width, depth, and movement of sounds that are made possible by a format like Dolby Atmos Music. When you’re used to stereo, spatial audio can be jarring. That disconnect can be made more pronounced when youintroduce head tracking, which Apple uses on itsAirPods Pro Gen 2/AirPods Pro Gen 2 USB-C,AirPods Max, andAirPods Gen 3, as well as Beats products like theStudio ProandFit Pro.
Then there’s the challenge, from an artistic perspective, in creating a Dolby Atmos Music track that uses the technology in a way that adds immersion, but doesn’t go too far. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can also end up with a classic track that has been remixed in Atmos, but that doesn’t offer a truly new way to experience the song. In the hands of an inexperienced engineer, this can rob a song of its impact instead of reinforcing it.
But if Apple doesn’t put any creative quality control measures in place — and it’s not clear that it could even if it wanted to (how do you tell an artist their Atmos track sucks?) — the financial incentive could favor quantity over quality. It could easily send record labels in search of shortcuts (perhaps even AI-driven remixing software) in order to backfill their catalogs as quickly as possible. That’s the last thing a nascent audio format needs.
There’s a parallel here to another immersive format: 3D. In the 3D feeding frenzy that happened after James Cameron revealed his groundbreaking 3D movieAvatar, many movie studios continued to shoot in 2D, relying instead on software to perform a conversion to 3D after the fact. The results were often less than impressive.
In fairness, Apple’s own requirements for Dolby Atmos Music submission prohibit this kind of thing. The very first line in itsImmersive Audio Source Profiledeclares that “Dolby Atmos audio files generated from stereo mixes are not allowed.”
I suspect that for many artists who are creating entirely new works and using Dolby’s suite of mixing tools to bring them to life, the results will be amazing. I’m slowly compiling a list of tracks that sound better to me in Dolby Atmos than in stereo. So far, most of them are recordings that were released in the past three years.
Which is not to say that songs that have been with us for decades as stereo tracks can’t be thoughtfully — and stunningly — remixed as Dolby Atmos (Giles Martin’sAtmos mix of INXS’Kickremains one of my favorites). But the promise of money can create unpredictable results, and there’s a real risk that Apple’s plan could backfire, and doom us to a massive library of spatial audio tracks that aren’t worth listening to.
