What you need to know
- Spotify announced the arrival of Lossless Listening, a Premium-exclusive feature that brings even more refined sound at the cost of more data for users.
- Lossless Listening works with private playlists and Liked Songs, but it supports everything else, too: DJ, Jam, Mix, AI Playlists, and Daylists.
- Users can activate it by going into their Profiles > Settings & Privacy > Media Quality > select where to enable Lossless.
- Lossless Listening is rolling out today (Sep 10), but it isn’t expected to be completed until October.
We’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for this one (since 2021, to be specific), but Spotify is finally rolling out its lossless audio upgrade.
Announced this morning (Sep 10) via its Newsroom, Spotify states Premium users will “gradually” see a Lossless Audio option for streamed music in “more than 50 markets.” Spotify’s vice president of subscriptions, Gustav Gyllenhammar, said, “The wait is finally over; we’re so excited lossless sound is rolling out to Premium subscribers.” Those getting into “Lossless Listening” via Spotify Premium today will find music streamed in 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC, per its post.
Spotify states this new streaming method will offer listeners “greater detail” for every song on the platform. New releases and even some of those older tracks that you may have in your favorites are supported by Lossless.
To activate Lossless, users should tap their Profile icon in the app > Settings & Privacy> Media Quality > select where to enable Lossless: Wi-Fi, Cellular, or Downloads.
Spotify says you will have to enable Lossless on every device you have manually. More than that, it’s recommended to experience Lossless over Wi-Fi with “wired headphones or speakers or a non-Bluetooth connection.” Spotify says the size of streamed Lossless audio is much larger, and Bluetooth signals don’t have the capacity to support it at its level of crispiness. After you’ve listened to a Lossless song once, though, it’ll load much faster the second time around.
Lossless is here
Premium subscribers can use Lossless audio in their own private playlists and Liked Songs, of course. However, Spotify says this feature extends to features like DJ, AI Playlists, Jam, Mix, and Daylist. It’s worth keeping in mind that Spotify’s Lossless seems to consume roughly 1GB of data per hour it’s playing. Spotify says you can choose your Lossless audio quality to help manage how much data is used.
Lossless Listening will be available on mobile, desktop, tablets, and devices that support Spotify Connect, like Sony, Bose, Samsung, and Sennheiser. Sonos and Amazon devices will grab support “next month.”
As Lossless makes its way to supported regions, Spotify says it’s already appearing for users in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden. We haven’t seen Lossless appear on the mobile app yet, but we did get a splash screen, stating “we’ll notify you when it’s available.”
We’ve been waiting on Spotify’s Lossless audio, which we’ve seen previously talked about as Hi-Fi (high fidelity), since 2021. The company first made the announcement as an “audio upgrade” that just never saw the light of day, leaving Premium subscribers (and us) wondering if it’d ever come out.
