since it’s night and day for me

Mind if I ask how did you A/B compare?

A lot of times between different services (and sometimes in the same service), the lossy and lossless versions of songs come from completely different masters, so what you might be hearing is the different in the quality of the original production and not the different of compression.

It sounds so bad compared to Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, Deezer, or even Napster.

First off, Youtube Music only does up to 256kbps AAC, which is similiar in quality to Spotify’s Ogg/Vorbis 320kbps.

Secondly, if you’re on android, for example, and are not using Tidal or USB Audio Player PRO with Deezer or Qobyz, you’re never getting true lossless because everything is being resampled to 48 000 Hz.

Also, not everybody can hear the difference between mp3 320kbps and lossless, but everybody can hear good equipment vs bad equipment on either format. Just because people aren’t going endgame extracting everything the human senses can catch from sound waves doesn’t mean they’re dumb or wasting money.