Spotify is finally launching high-quality lossless music streaming for premium account holders after years of anticipation. The company first discussed a hi-fi tier back in 2021, which promised CD-quality audio, but the plan encountered multiple delays. These delays were partially due to licensing issues.
Last year, CEO Daniel Ek stated the company was in the early stages of launching lossless streaming support. Over the past few years, various reports and hints within the app’s code suggested Spotify was planning to introduce a more expensive tier for lossless music.
Now the company is officially releasing support for streaming up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC quality. This format preserves the original audio quality without any compression for paid users. Spotify announced that lossless streaming will be rolling out to users in over 50 countries through the month of October. Subscribers in Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK are already gaining access.
Users will receive a notification in their app when they get access to lossless streaming. The feature can be enabled by going to Settings and Privacy, then selecting Media Quality, and choosing “Lossless” quality for streaming on Wi-Fi, cellular data, and downloads.
The company confirmed the feature is available across devices, but it must be manually enabled for each device. This means the setting does not automatically apply to all the devices used with a single Spotify account.
Because files with lossless streaming are larger, users will be able to track how much data they have used for streaming. While lossless quality tracks can be streamed over Wi-Fi, this is not possible for Bluetooth-connected devices due to bandwidth limitations. To stream over Wi-Fi, users can utilize Spotify Connect to link to compatible devices from companies like Bose, Yamaha, and Bluesound.
Notably, Apple has also previously complained about Bluetooth’s bandwidth restrictions for streaming high-quality music.
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 initially launching a paid HD tier in 2019.
Spotify said this launch covers nearly every track in its 100-million-song library, so there might be a small number of tracks without lossless support.