Spotify finally begins supporting lossless music streaming

Spotify will finally launch high quality lossless music streaming support from premium account owners after many years of waiting.

The company first spoke about the HI-FI layer in 2021, which will provide CD-quality audio, but in part faced multiple delays due to licensing issues. Last year, CEO Daniel Ek said the company was “early” in launching lossless streaming support.

Over the past few years, app reporting and code tips suggest that the company plans to introduce more expensive layers for lossless music as well.

Currently, the company is finally releasing support for streaming up to 24-bit/44.1 KHz FLAC quality (a format that preserves the original audio quality without compression) for paid users. The company said lossless streaming will be rolled out to users in more than 50 countries until October. He added that subscribers from Australia, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US and the UK have already accessed it.

Users will receive notifications on the app when they access lossless streaming. You can enable the feature from Settings & Privacy > Media Quality and choose “lossless” quality for streaming Wi-Fi, cellular data and downloads.

The company says the feature is available between devices, but it must be enabled manually on a per-device basis. This means that the settings will not be automatically applied to all devices used in your Spotify account.

The large files with lossless streaming allow you to track how much data you used for streaming. You can stream Lossless quality tracks over Wi-Fi, but this is not possible on devices connected to Bluetooth due to bandwidth limitations. You can use Spotify Connect to connect to corporate devices such as Bose, Yamaha, BlueSound and other to stream music over Wi-Fi. In particular, Apple has previously complained about Bluetooth bandwidth limits for streaming high-quality music.

Spotify has been slow to fulfill its promise to make lossless music available to users. Rivals like Apple Music rolled out it in 2021, and Amazon Music released the paid HD tier in 2019 before giving lossless streaming free and free. Spotify may have no lossless support tracks, as this launch covers “almost every track” in its 100 million songs library.