'warm digital tone' of compressed audio
ack on the lossy compression. sometimes it makes it sound "better" but just as often, not.
This also relates to the perceived "loudness war" i.e. max out the digital signal values on EVERYTHING, keeping it on "max loud" all of the time [cutting off transients, and adding some harmonic distortion in the process]. Strangely, mp3'ing or ogg'ing that tends to mellow out some of the artifacts caused by the clipping...
So the REAL problem might be "the loudness war" - and of course the streaming audio could sound just a _bit_ better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war