Lossless Listening Arrives on Spotify Premium (for real, this time)

Audio Gear Talk Music Services
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Thanks for the link. :slightly_smiling_face:

In another response, he does say there are some members on the team that want to do WASAPI for Windows. Hopefully that comes to pass. Still, having any 48/96 content resampled to 44.1 by Spotify in the delivery itself just leaves a bad taste. Tidal, Qobuz, Amazon Music, and Apple can do native full high res bit rates just fine. This feels like MQA all over in principle. Just give us the original untouched file and implement bit perfect playback. My Spotify Premium costs more than Tidal also…

During my comparison between Spotify, Amazon and Tidal (through Roon and Tidal’s app for with and without exclusive mode), I compared all the playback configurations for myself already, which is why I pay attention to it.

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No, not even in principle. MQA was lossy; sample rate conversion to 44.1 will not remove any audible content. Besides, you don’t know if they’re doing that.

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Thanks @Suedkiez and @RBM . It seems that Spotify Connect drops 24 bit music to 16 bit for Connect to hardware, that is true even after I did a fair amount of work to change the Connect client code path to prepare for 24 bit FLAC without truncation.

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65

This is interesting, so the Linn network streamers would have the same problem?

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Delivery and processing details

  • Tracks delivered at sample rates higher than 44.1 kHz (e.g., 48 kHz, 96 kHz) or bit depths higher than 24-bit are downsampled and/or reduced to a maximum of 44.1 kHz / 24-bit FLAC for playback on supported clients, with a fallback to 16-bit FLAC for backward compatibility.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Spotify or Spotify HiFi in Roon [spotify will not allow this]

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There’s an excellent summary post covering a lot of ground regarding the Spotify lossless rollout here:

In summary, Spotify’s multi-year delay wasn’t because they couldn’t figure out FLAC – it was about when and how to launch it without hurting their business . They had to renegotiate terms in an industry that was shifting to make lossless a free commodity, and they had to prepare their platform to serve a lot more data. By 2025, the planets aligned: licensing hurdles were resolved and Spotify was ready to eat the infrastructure cost as the price of remaining competitive. As Gustav Söderström said of the long wait, “We’re going to do it in a way where it makes sense for us and for our listeners” whathifi.com – and that turned out to be bundling it into Premium at the right moment.

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Spotify Lossless through Librespot Entrypoint won’t work until the librespot open source library has been updated to support Lossless, but the code maintainers are looking into it.

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Hi! Spotify still have one of the lowest payments per stream. If we want musicians, artists etc still making music in the future it’s better to choose Qobuz who have a much higher payment. The only one who benefit on Spotify is Spotify themself!

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Whilst this is true in terms of artist payment, this discussion isn’t about this. It’s simply about the roll out of lossless.

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I would not careless about the Spotify’s business model , if you don’t like, leave it.

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You know, I have to go to work in the office every day. 80% of people earn money by working every day except weekends. Musicians earn money by working at live shows, performing at concerts and making music. Concerts and performances are enough to create new music, aren’t they?
Why you think them need to get more?

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Again, this is partly true as there are lesser known artists that I like that don’t make a lot of money from what you mentioned. Again, this thread isn’t about this.

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Probably because every day someone (or some bit of software) at Spotify is working out whether their revenue increases if they switch to lossless. They may get a few more subscribers with lossless but it costs them more in bandwidth. When the equation flipped to lossless being more profitable they flipped the switch. And i suspect that is exactly why it took then so long as they already had the biggest user base and (debatably) the best discovery service and the other services had to offer lossless as a reason to switch.

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I think it is more about retention. Their main competitors aren’t Qobuz and TIDAL, but Amazon and Apple, who already offer hi-res titles.

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I believe the license costs are far more significant (despite the reported payment to artists), based on past public news of what the CEO said about the reason of the delay - licensing issues.

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In related news: I picked up the new Bose Quietcomfort Ultra 2 Headphones this weekend – mainly for ANC when flying, but the USB-C audio feature compliments Spotify Lossless quite nicely… :wink:

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I’m not defending are arguing against Spotify having the lowest payout per stream, but I don’t think it’s correct to state that musicians should prioritise Qobuz (or other with higher payout)

One must consider that Spotify have 600(?) million users. I assume Qobuz and Tidal have a fraction of that.

In terms of actual cash payout Spotify will be the main source for artists (unfortunately)

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Naim has shown this is not the case for their hardware. Shows 24bit when the file is 24bit. But did note there a lot 16bit files on Spotify.

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Yes, I also found Denon gets 24-bit. I’ll need to find out why we got 16-bit only.

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