Spotify Starts Rolling Out Lossless Streaming to Premium Members

Following years of promises, Spotify is finally adding lossless streaming to its service. And the good news is that it will be available at no additional cost for Premium members.

“The wait is finally over; we’re so excited lossless sound is rolling out to Premium subscribers,” said Gustav Gyllenhammar, VP Subscriptions, Spotify. “We’ve taken time to build this feature in a way that prioritizes quality, ease of use, and clarity at every step, so you always know what’s happening under the hood. With Lossless, our premium users will now have an even better listening experience.”

Better music quality has been a top-requested feature from Spotify users, especially as competing services like Apple Music and Amazon Music have been offering music in spatial audio quality for years. Spotify doesn’t go as far as it will only let Premium users stream tracks in up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC.

Lossless streaming is available on mobile devices, desktops, and tablets, as well as on Sony, Bose, Samsung, Sennheiser, and other devices that support Spotify Connect. Speakers from Sonos and Amazon will add support for lossless streaming next month.

Spotify Premium users can turn on lossless audio by going to Settings & Privacy → Media Quality, but they will need to enable it manually on all of their devices. “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,” the company explained.

Lossless streaming is starting to roll out to Spotify Premium members in Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the US, and the UK. The feature will be rolled out to more than 50 markets by October.