Spotify is finally launching high-quality, lossless music streaming support for premium account holders after years of waiting.
The company first talked about a hi-fi tier in 2021 — which would offer CD-quality audio –but the plan faced multiple delays, partially due to licensing issues. Last year, CEO Daniel Ek said that the company was in the “early days” of launching lossless streaming support.
Over the past few years, reports and code hints in the app suggested that the company was planning to introduce a more expensive tier for lossless music as well.
Now the company is finally releasing support for up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC quality streaming — a format that preserves the original audio quality without compression — for paid users. The company said lossless streaming will be rolling out to users in in over 50 countries through October. It added that subscribers in Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK are already getting access.
Users will get a notification on their app when they get access to lossless streaming. You can enable the feature from Settings and Privacy > Media Quality and selecting “Lossless” quality for streaming on Wi-Fi, cellular data, and downloads.
The company said that the feature is available across devices, but you have to manually enable it for each device. That means the setting doesn’t apply to all the devices you use with your Spotify account automatically.
As files with lossless streaming are larger, you will be able to keep track of how much data you have used for streaming. While you can stream lossless quality tracks over Wi-Fi, this is not possible for Bluetooth-connected devices due to bandwidth limitations. You can use Spotify Connect to connect to devices from companies like Bose, Yamaha, and Bluesound to stream the music over Wi-Fi. Notably, Apple has also previously complained about Bluetooth’s bandwidth restrictions for streaming high-quality music.
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Spotify is late to deliver on its promises of making lossless music available to users. Rivals like Apple Music rolled it out in 2021, and Amazon Music made its lossless streaming free after launching a paid HD tier in 2019. Spotify said that this launch covers “nearly every track” in its 100-million-son library, so there might be some tracks without lossless support.
