Spotify has announced that it is rolling out lossless audio quality to users. The music streaming platform had originally announced CD quality music playback in February 2021.
After a short period of just four years, the feature is finally here. Did you know that users had been requesting for lossless quality streaming on Spotify for a decade? Apple Music has supported lossless for 4 years, so has Amazon Music HD (not in all countries).
Spotify free users, you better look away now. Lossless is only for Premium subscribers. Jokes aside, you shouldn't get too excited even if you are a Premium user. Spotify's announcement says that it is rolling out lossless quality gradually in 50 markets through October. Premium subscribers in the following countries have started to get access to lossless quality: Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK.
Premium users will be able to stream high-fidelity music in up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC. Once you get a notification that Lossless is available on your account, you will need to enable it from your profile > Settings > Media quality. Set the quality to Lossless, and your network preference for it, WiFi, cellular, downloads. You can start listening to Hi-fi music, the quality will show up as Lossless 16-bit or Lossless 24-bit. And yes, it's only available for music, other content such as music videos, podcasts, audiobooks are not available in Hi-fi. Users can set the quality from the Connect menu too. You will need to switch to Lossless on each device, because the setting uses a large amount of data to download/stream the music. Speaking of downloaded songs, they will play in the quality they were downloaded in. So you will need to clear your offline backup and downloads, and redownload them in lossless quality.
Lossless is supported on Spotify mobile, desktop, and tablet. You can also access it on devices that support Spotify Connect, such as Sony, Bose, Samsung, Sennheiser, etc. Spotify says that it will soon add support for more devices, like those from Sonos and Amazon. Spotify recommends using wired headphones or speakers to listen to Lossless.
Earlier this year, Spotify was said to be working on a Music Pro plan that would introduce Hi-fi music at an additional price. But the real surprise is that Spotify isn't charging extra for lossless quality, yet. Meanwhile, Google is trying to make lyrics on YouTube Music a premium feature.
Which music streaming service do you use?
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