It’s been four years since Spotify announced it was launching a lossless tier. It’s now rolling out to Premium subscribers, and you’d have thought there’d be people dancing in their homes to their Spotify playlists.
But the response seems to be something of a shrug.
Has Spotify missed the lossless boat? Does anyone really care about lossless audio? Will it drive more people to the Premium tier?
The answer to those questions doesn’t sound like a definitive yes. More of a maybe…
Four years too late
When it was first announced back in 2021, I, probably like many others, thought it’d be something of a flick of a switch. Surely Spotify would have signed deals with record labels to offer access to their lossless libraries and it’d be here in a few months.
It turns out the announcement was more of a declaration of intent.
For whatever reason, Spotify has dragged its feet in adding lossless audio; and the longer it’s gone on, the more it’s come across as if Spotify was less enthused about it than its subscribers were.
At first, speculation was that it was going to be its own tier on top of Premium called Hi-Fi (or Pro or something). But since the announcement, virtually every other music streaming service has recalibrated its pricing tiers to be around the same price as Spotify Premium. If Spotify was ever going to reach for a higher price, it was going to be on its own.
Qobuz were the first to introduce lossless audio, and it started that ‘club’ a long time ago. With Apple, Amazon, Tidal, Deezer also offering lossless, Spotify’s proposition wasn’t unique in any way – it was playing catch-up.
And for subscribers who wanted lossless audio years ago to justify the price increases Spotify placed on its customer base, the arrival of lossless comes a little too late.
While Spotify has served to add lots of features to add to its ‘experience’, I’ve always wanted better sound than 320kbps Org Vorbis files. Other streaming sites were offering fibre optic, while Spotify was stuck in the MP3 dial-up days of the first iTunes player.
Even Spotify don’t seem too excited
While there have been plenty of leaks of mock-ups of how the lossless tier would look, Spotify’s communication about it has always been a bit… lethargic.
The lack of enthusiasm seems to have poured into this announcement. Perhaps having finally in italics is meant to represent excitement, but I can’t help looking at that word and thinking it reflects a sense of exasperation. Finally, it’s over.
I’ve heard about Spotify taking journalists to New York for events about podcasts (seriously, podcasts) but lossless gets a press release and push on Spotify’s blog. And that’s if you got the press release.
Talking to a few other UK tech journalists, several of them hadn’t received the press release for the announcement (I checked my spam, it’s not there either), and only one person on the Trusted Reviews team received the release.
I’ve received more emails from audio brands telling me they support Spotify Lossless than I did from Spotify itself.
It doesn’t help matters that the announcement was the day after Apple’s September event. Other brands would likely move the orbit of Apple, and in hindsight, the announcement felt buried amongst other news.
The Bluetooth and Apple problem
While Spotify says it’s “taken time to build this feature”, I don’t think it’s a good idea to announce a feature and then start working on it, nor is it particularly great that the process took four years (probably more) to complete. Spotify has a habit of taking weeks, months, or in this case, years, to bring what looks like a relatively simple product to its customers.
But perhaps Spotify was waiting for something else to improve. Perhaps it wanted Bluetooth to be in a place where it could offer those higher-quality streams. While Bluetooth has made strides to offer better fidelity when it comes to audio, it isn’t quite true lossless.
Bluetooth codecs such as LDAC and LHDC claim to be able to offer lossless audio, but in truth they’re lossy (as in, data is lost over the course of transmission).
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound aims to deliver lossless audio quality over a Bluetooth connection, but this is an end-to-end platform. You need a source (Spotify Lossless), a device (mobile or portable music player) and a receiver (headphones or a wireless speaker) that support aptX Lossless to access this higher level of quality.
And Apple does not support aptX Lossless. In fact, it supports nothing above AAC in terms of Bluetooth codecs, so the company that probably sells the most smartphones and certainly sells the most headphones does not support a feature that offer higher levels of clarity and detail.
Bugger.
That doesn’t mean that the lossless audio paradise is lost. Wi-Fi is the way you can listen to High-Res audio at home, though this doesn’t get past the issue of using it when you’re out and about. Unless you had a headphone that supported a Wi-Fi dongle – that would make it easier on other Wi-Fi connections that are not your own.
Apple, Amazon, Qobuz, and Tidal offer higher quality
It doesn’t help that, in Spotify’s quest for higher quality audio, there’s a list of music streaming services that already have it beat.
Spotify reaches as far as 24-bit/44.1KHz. Apple, Amazon, Qobuz and Tidal can go all the way up to 24-bit/192KHz FLAC. The higher the number, the better the quality; and in that respect all these other websites have Spotify’s number.
I imagine most users won’t be fussed by the bit-rate Spotify has chosen but it simply is strange that Spotify has allowed its rivals the breathing space to say that they are better.
This whole lossless audio adventure Spotify has travelled on, has been weird. I can’t quite fathom why it’s taken so long or some of the decisions Spotify has made.
But hey, lossless audio is finally on Spotify.
