More leaks give hope to Spotify actually launching lossless audio

After years of promises and nothing to show for it, a new leak suggests that Spotify may actually be close to launching lossless audio on its service. Maybe.

Lossless audio is a music streaming feature that purportedly offers extremely high fidelity audio via sky-high bitrates. It's a big draw for audiophiles, but not every major streaming service offers it.

Following two weeks after a leak that Spotify HiFi may finally be on the way, another collection of leaks offer more details. According to another Reddit leak spotted by The Verge, one change is a rebranding away from "HiFi" and to the generally used term "Lossless."

The new leak from u/OhitsTom consists of screenshots supposedly taken from version 1.2.36 of the service's app for Windows. Listed under Streaming quality is an option for Lossless, listed as the highest of the five available.

Lossless is described as music that runs at up to 2,117kbps, at up to 15.9 megabytes per minute. By comparison, "Very High" is 320kbps, consuming 2MB per minute.

Leaked UI elements for Spotify lossless audio [Reddit]

The lossless audio is also 24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC. There's an additional note that lossless will "play when available" when the option is set, and it is available "on limited songs."

The images also show a compatibility checker, which offers further advice for downloading music in lossless. It also warns that Bluetooth can offer very high quality audio, but not full lossless support.

A wired connection is offered as the best way to enjoy Lossless. However, the same section advises that users could use Spotify Connect on speakers.

Despite appearing in the UI, the leaker says that the feature is only present in the interface, but not working. It's seemingly not possible to listen to lossless music from Spotify, at least pre-launch.

Just the latest chapter in a long string of broken promises

The new leaks of Spotify getting lossless audio may be of little comfort to users. Mainly because it has been in development for so long.

In February 2022, Spotify HiFi was announced as a way to stream a CD-quality lossless audio format to users. At the time, it was expected to launch later in 2021.

Two years later, the prospect of the service was raised again. This time, a "Supremium" tier was proposed, with expectation of a launch in late 2023.

If the service does actually launch this time, Spotify's feature will arrive long after rivals have implemented theirs.

While Apple Music announced Lossless in May 2021, less than a month went by before it actually made the feature available to the public. Unlike rumors about Spotify, Apple's Lossless feature was included as part of the existing subscription.

Many other major services have lossless streaming, including Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, and Pandora.

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19 Comments

CuJoYYC 86 comments · 8 Years

About 6 months ago

I'm sure the delay is Apple's fault.
;)

xyzzy01 143 comments · 15 Years

CuJoYYC said:

I'm sure the delay is Apple's fault.
;)

That's likely, actually. Before Apple launched lossless with no change in price, it was an option that came at a premium. When Apple just included it in their normal subscription, launching it at a higher price tier was less attractive - and adding it to their normal subscription wo ld just cost Spotify more in fees and bandwidth.

Spotify makes their living from their service, for Apple it's just a part of keeping you in the eco system.

AppleZulu 2169 comments · 8 Years

xyzzy01 said:

CuJoYYC said:

I'm sure the delay is Apple's fault.
;)

That's likely, actually. Before Apple launched lossless with no change in price, it was an option that came at a premium. When Apple just included it in their normal subscription, launching it at a higher price tier was less attractive - and adding it to their normal subscription wo ld just cost Spotify more in fees and bandwidth.

Spotify makes their living from their service, for Apple it's just a part of keeping you in the eco system.

Apple's decision to make lossless and spatial audio formats available at no extra cost is what moved those things (particularly spatial audio) from niche formats into the mainstream. Tidal had Dolby Atmos a year before Apple, but paying extra for it was a truly unrewarding experience. The extra cost kept the user base small, which made the incentive to produce and make content available in those formats correspondingly small. It was a death-spiral. A few months after signing up, you'd listened to what they had, and new premium content was arriving at a slow trickle. Then Apple opened lossless and spatial audio up to all of its subscribers, and there was suddenly a reason to make the effort to produce and master lossless and spatial audio content, and there's been a flood of it rolling out since.

On the one hand, that surely threw a kink into Spotify's plans of charging a premium to pay for building out the storage and bandwidth, but on the other hand, because of Apple, there's already a lot of content produced and made available in high resolution formats.

It's interesting, however, that even at this point, it looks like Spotify is wimping out quite a bit. There's no mention of spatial audio at all, and while it appears they're going to have full 24-bit depth on the vertical axis, they're limiting the sampling rate (the horizontal axis) to 14.1 kHz, the bare minimum to qualify. Apple's lossless streaming is up to 24-bit/48kHz, and you can download 24-bit/192kHz audio files.

While it's true that Apple has a whole ecosystem to support their decisions, it's doubtful that they're taking a financial loss beyond the very short term to implement their lossless and spatial audio music formats. I probably wouldn't recommend investing in Spotify, because they truly seem to lack the fundamentals at both ends of their business. They're on the low end for paying out to artists for content (the thing they sell), and are clearly struggling to generate the revenue required to keep up with the now-inevitable shift to lossless and spatial audio formats, the merging standard for the thing they sell. Talk about a death spiral, you may be looking at one right there.

Alex_V 257 comments · 6 Years

xyzzy01 said:

Spotify makes their living from their service, for Apple it's just a part of keeping you in the eco system.

Apple makes money by selling computer hardware, software, and services, which are well integrated and make up their ‘ecosystem.’ Still, Apple intends to profit (sooner or later) from each part of the ecosystem, including services like Music. If not, or if any part is not profitable enough, it gets the axe.