Spotify rolls out long-promised lossless streaming to Premium subscribers

[Skye Jacobs]

What just happened? Spotify is finally delivering on a promise it made years ago: lossless audio streaming. After repeated delays and false starts dating back to 2017, the company confirmed this week that Premium subscribers in more than 50 markets will soon be able to stream music in higher-resolution formats at no additional cost.

Speculation about a Spotify HiFi tier began nearly a decade ago, and in early 2021 the company pledged that lossless streaming would arrive "later this year." By mid-2024, internal interface leaks suggested it was nearly ready... only for more delays to follow. That history left many Premium users skeptical when rumors of an imminent rollout resurfaced this summer.

Unlike earlier reports that hinted at a paid upgrade potentially under names like "Music Pro" or "Deluxe," Spotify has confirmed the new feature will be included in its existing Premium subscription at no extra cost. Pricing across all affected markets will remain unchanged.

The first countries to receive the update include the US, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, and several others across Europe and Oceania. Spotify says Premium listeners will see a notification in the app once the option becomes available to them, with rollout scheduled to continue through October.

Once enabled, users can activate lossless streaming by navigating to Settings - Media Quality and selecting Lossless for Wi-Fi, mobile data, or downloads. Playback indicators in the Now Playing bar and Spotify Connect menu will confirm whether a song is streaming in the higher-resolution format.

Spotify's new option streams audio files up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz in FLAC format. While this quality surpasses the platform's existing "Very High" setting, it still falls short of Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz, which all offer Hi-Res audio up to 24-bit/192 kHz. For most listeners, however, the audible difference between 44.1 kHz and higher sampling rates is marginal unless paired with high-end audio equipment.

High-resolution streaming also comes with practical limitations. Bluetooth connections generally cannot transmit full lossless files without compression, meaning wired headphones, supported speakers, or devices using Spotify Connect are recommended for the best experience. Spotify Connect compatibility includes products from Sony, Bose, Samsung, and Sennheiser, with Sonos and Amazon devices expected to gain support next month.

Lossless files are significantly larger than compressed tracks, increasing storage requirements for downloads and demanding stronger network connections for streaming. To address this, Spotify has added new media quality controls to help subscribers manage bandwidth usage across Wi-Fi, mobile, and offline playback, and has included rough data-consumption estimates with each setting.

With lossless streaming, YouTube Music becomes the only major streaming service without CD-quality or higher audio formats. Despite years of requests, Google has not indicated any plans to add similar functionality.

For Spotify, the long-awaited launch closes a chapter that has frustrated many subscribers while also moving the company closer to parity with competitors. Whether the service will eventually offer higher-resolution tiers – potentially tied to a more expensive plan – remains an open question.

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Spotify rolls out long-promised lossless streaming to Premium subscribers

 

[themastergoose]

They rushed the release. /s

 

[havok585]

"Spotify's new option streams audio files up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz in FLAC format. While this quality surpasses the platform's existing "Very High" setting, it still falls short of Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz, which all offer Hi-Res audio up to 24-bit/192 kHz."

unless apple/tidal/qobuz offers FLAC and I havent seen that, then no, Spotify does not fall short, since khz does not mean anything above 40khz for the human ears, only the sound depth and both are 24bits but now spotify offers even FLAC format, then it's superior.

 

[DukeJukem]

unless apple/tidal/qobuz offers FLAC and I havent seen that, then no, Spotify does not fall short, since khz does not mean anything above 40khz for the human ears, only the sound depth and both are 24bits but now spotify offers even FLAC format, then it's superior.

anyone who's dabbled in the "audiophile" space would point and laugh at such ignorance and copium. go download (not stream) a proper flac (or whatever format) file in both 44.1khz, 48, 96 and 192 on capable hardware and tell me your ears hear no difference lol. it doesn't even need to be a lossless file format. if the producer properly masters the audio, you will hear a difference on appropriate hardware. good lord.

 

[VariableSpike]

anyone who's dabbled in the "audiophile" space would point and laugh at such ignorance and copium. go download (not stream) a proper flac (or whatever format) file in both 44.1khz, 48, 96 and 192 on capable hardware and tell me your ears hear no difference lol. it doesn't even need to be a lossless file format. if the producer properly masters the audio, you will hear a difference on appropriate hardware. good lord.

Unfortunately complete placebo, the nyquist frequency, which dictates the maximun frequency of continuous analog audio that can be perfectly represented as digital audio, is half the sample rate, so for 48khz audio, its 24khz, where the maximum audible frequency for humans is about 20-25khz, dependent on age and other personal factors, and so a higher sample rate will do nothing for the listening experience as we can already perfectly represent the highest audible frequency, sure you could argue ultrasonics at 30-40khz or whatever as you could theoretically perceive the difference in that even if its not audible, but most mics and recording are not setup to capture that content and in production it will usually get cut out by a high pass filter anyway as to eliminate any high frequency whine / screeches that may appear anywhere in the audio, so unfortunately anything above 48khz sample rate is very much placebo and marketing guff
Where high sample rate is useful is in audio production, as it gives you more headroom for filters and how they ramp, less aliasing on them, pitch shifts will have more data points to work with as well as any other mathematically intensive processing on the audio, so its useful for audio engineers and the like, but of no matter to someone listening so "standard" 48khz is practically the same as "192kz high-res audio" or whatever marketing is used to describe it

 

[RudyBob]

anyone who's dabbled in the "audiophile" space

Whenever I see the word "audiophile" I scream. I think it is a misspelled acronym for SNOB

 

[SRB]

anyone who's dabbled in the "audiophile" space would point and laugh at such ignorance and copium. go download (not stream) a proper flac (or whatever format) file in both 44.1khz, 48, 96 and 192 on capable hardware and tell me your ears hear no difference lol. it doesn't even need to be a lossless file format. if the producer properly masters the audio, you will hear a difference on appropriate hardware. good lord.

Yeah, but not all of us have $300 "oxygen-free" speaker cables to connect our $10,000 "single ended tube amplifier" to hook up our $5,000 sliver soldered Digital audo converter that can perfectly recreate sounds that only bats can hear with 24bit, 192khz accuracy.

It's amazing for an AV setup when you pair it with a 30" 32bit 8k OLED monitor. You can see so much more detail with it.

 

[felipetga]

Maybe I can finally use spotify on my desktop! Been using winamp with myhigh bitrate MP3 and Flac collection for the past 30 years almost...
The difference between Spotify curretn High quality and a Flac file being played on my good, but no high end sound system is night and day, and I'm no bat.