Eight years ago, Spotify started testing hi-res audio. Four years later, it made an official announcement that hi-fi audio would land in 2021. It didn’t. Then, last year, the company announced that its lossless audio support was almost ready, but it never materialized. It’s been a long road of endless teasing, but Spotify has finally added lossless streaming to the service for all Premium users as of today, and it has done so without raising prices.
Sadly for me, I gave up on waiting for lossless streaming to land and ditched my Premium plan months ago, and now that I’ve built new workflows for discovering music, lossless isn’t enough to bring me back. It’s a shame Spotify waited this long to add such an essential feature that competitors have offered for years.
Call it hi-fi, call it hi-res, call it lossless, Spotify finally has the goods
Source: Spotify
Leave it to Spotify to bury its media quality setting for lossless audio. This is likely why it made a cute little cheat sheet (above) to help users find the setting so they can toggle the app’s new lossless feature. It’ll require four clicks/taps to move from your account image, to your settings page, to your media quality setting, to then finally select lossless FLAC support for your streaming.
Heck, Spotify is so worried you won’t be able to find the setting that it even made a video for today’s announcement to show where the lossless setting is hidden. Yep, this new feature feels incredibly well planned, not like the company hasn’t had eight freaking years to polish the setting and its placement for release.
You may not have access yet; Spotify’s lossless feature is gradually rolling out
Like many features in the tech world, Spotify is gradually rolling out its lossless audio support. It’s starting with 50 markets: Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK. This rollout is expected to take two months.
Ideally, Premium users will receive a notification once lossless is available, and then you’ll have to dig into the settings to turn it on. At the very least, you should even be able to see which connected devices support lossless from the Now Playing bar.
Of course, FLACs tend to be large files (at least compared to compressed audio like MP3s), so you’ll want to stream your lossless tunes over Wi-Fi; Bluetooth isn’t supported. This will ensure there’s enough bandwidth to keep the tunes playing. This means the use of wired headphones is recommended, and if you are going to connect a device wirelessly, use Spotify Connect since it doesn’t rely on Bluetooth.
Spotify joins the lossless streaming club, leaving YouTube Music as the last major holdout
There’s no doubt Spotify held out as long as it could, but it has finally capitulated to its fans’ demands by adding the one feature everyone has been begging for: lossless audio. This leaves Google and its YouTube Music service as one of the last major lossless holdouts, and perhaps today’s news will finally put enough pressure on Google to do what’s needed.
As for me, lossless is no longer a concern since I buy my FLACs directly from bands on Bandcamp. Maybe if services like Spotify and YouTube Music hadn’t dragged their feet, I’d be more interested in giving them my money. Oh well, you snooze, you lose, plus I’d rather support the bands I love rather than faceless corporations that provide them pennies for streams.
