Over four years after its initial announcement, Spotify is finally rolling out lossless streaming quality to Premium users and, in a fun surprise, it won’t cost anything extra.
In a post today, Spotify has confirmed that it is now rolling out lossless audio quality in select regions.
You’ll need to use Spotify Connect or wired headphones (analog or USB) to listen to lossless tracks at full quality. Apparently, “many devices” with Spotify Connect already support lossless from brands such as Sony, Samsung, Bose, and Sennheiser, with additional devices from Sonos and Amazon adding support “next month.” Bluetooth is explicitly not supported.
For the smoothest and best listening experience, we recommend streaming lossless music on Wi-Fi using wired headphones or speakers on a non-Bluetooth connection, like Spotify Connect. Currently, Bluetooth doesn’t provide enough bandwidth to transmit lossless audio, so the signal has to be compressed before being sent.
When lossless is enabled, music streams in 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC, a big upgrade from existing quality settings, but not quite matching that of other lossless providers. Tidal, for example, supports 24-bit/192 kHz FLAC in its HiRes streaming.
Still, this has been a long time coming.
Spotify first announced that it would support this upgraded quality back in 2021, originally calling the addition “HiFi.” The added tier has reportedly been ready for years, but was never rolled out, seemingly due to cost. There were hints it would be a $5/ 5/month add-on, but the final product is, surprisingly, coming at no added cost for Spotify Premium subscribers. Lossless streaming on Spotify isn’t free, but it doesn’t cost anything extra. It’s now an included part of the normal Premium subscription, a big change from what we expected. Originally, Spotify directly said that lossless streaming would not be inlcuded in Premium.
Spotify adds that lossless is enabled on a device-by-device level, so you’ll need to manually turn it on for each device you have. An indicator will appear on Connect devices to show whether or not they’re streaming with lossless quality. For phones and tablets, you can enable lossless via the existing media quality settings.
To turn on lossless audio in the Spotify app:
- Tap your profile icon in the top left.
- Go to Settings & Privacy → Media Quality.
- Select where you want to enable lossless audio: Wi-Fi, cellular, downloads.
Spotify says that lossless is now rolling out to Premium subscribers in “Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK.”
More on Spotify:
Follow Ben: Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
