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It’s official: Spotify finally supports lossless audio. The company made the announcement in a blog post on Wednesday, revealing that the high fidelity audio option will begin rolling out to Premium subscribers in “select markets.”
That means if you live in one of those select markets and pay for Spotify, you’ll be able to enjoy your music in up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC. That’s quite the jump: Previously, Spotify Premium supported up to 320kbit/s on its apps, and only 256kbit/s on the web.
How to take advantage of lossless audio
What the change means for you is a better listening experience, assuming you’re using high quality headphones or speakers. 320kbit/s audio sounds good enough, but it’s compressed, which means you’re losing audio data in the name of lowering storage or streaming sizes. Lossless audio, on the other hand, keeps all the original audio data during compression, so with the right equipment, you’ll be able to hear more details in your music than before.
That doesn’t mean these other quality configurations are going away. 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC likely uses a lot of data, whether you’re streaming or downloading the lossless files. Spotify hasn’t shared what those file sizes are yet, so we can’t know for sure what the difference will be. But if you have a limited cellular data plan, or a device with limited storage, streaming or downloading in lossless might not be feasible.
You might not actually notice a difference anyway, particularly if you typically use Bluetooth headphones or speakers. Bluetooth is convenient, but the technology is limited when it comes to audio quality: It can support high quality audio playback, but not lossless, so anything above that 320kbit/s will likely be compressed before it reaches your ears. As such, Spotify recommends you used wired audio outputs when playing back lossless tracks.
I’m not sure exactly what took Spotify so long to roll this out. The company has been teasing the option since February 2021, while other streaming services—notably, Tidal and Apple Music—jumped on the bandwagon years ago.
Spotify plans to roll out lossless audio to over 50 markets, but is starting with the following: Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the U.S., and the U.K.
How to stream lossless on Spotify
Credit: Spotify
Spotify says you’ll need to manually enable lossless on each device you listen on. When the feature rolls out to you, you will have to do the following:
Open Spotify, then tap your profile in the top left.
Head to Settings and privacy > Media Quality.
Here, choose Lossless.
You can also choose how you want to experience lossless, including over cellular, downloads, or wifi.
