At least Apple just added the option at no additional cost. Spatial Audio is way more noticeable then lossless
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Elusive Spotify Lossless Option May Arrive as Paid 'Music Pro' Add-on
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Spotify supposedly has 30% of the streaming market according to this article: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/music-streaming-stats
Not sure how accurate this would be. 8 out of 9 people in my family use an iPhone and all 8/9 sub to Spotify. Apple Music has no appeal for them.
Not sure how accurate this would be. 8 out of 9 people in my family use an iPhone and all 8/9 sub to Spotify. Apple Music has no appeal for them.
Worldwide this is probably accurate. Keep in mind that in China's huge market Tencent (with their Kugou, Kuwo and QQ brands) dominates. But globally Spotify is still more than twice as big as the next biggest competitor.
I don't think lossless music makes much of a dent. Most people don't care about it. It's also kind of ridiculous to listen to lossless music using earbuds.
What’s the point? It’s a feature for a niche group of audiophile nerds and tech reviewers - commercially it won’t move the needle, given how poorly Tidal has been doing. Costs of the feature will be high (extra storage, bandwidth, complexity).![]()
Spotify's elusive lossless music experience is being teased again, this time based on code uncovered by The Verge in recent builds of the Spotify app for Android.
![General-Spotify-Feature.jpg]()
More than three years have elapsed since Spotify announced its intention to offer a "HiFi" premium option that would give users access to a catalog of CD-quality music tracks. Originally the company said the tier would go live by the end of 2021, but a shift in the wider streaming market upended that idea.
Apple Music has since rolled lossless listening into its standard subscription price, while Amazon stopped charging extra for its lossless music library. The moves effectively kiboshed Spotify's original strategy of marketing an exclusively lossless HiFi tier.
That said, it doesn't sound as if lossless is coming as a free perk. The latest rumors suggest that Spotify now aims to offer lossless audio playback in an optional "Music Pro" add-on that will also include new DJ remix features, which let subscribers "speed up, mash-up, and otherwise edit" tracks from their favorite artists, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Spotify will likely make some basic remixing tools available as part of its Premium subscription (currently $10.99 a month, or $5.99 for students), but more powerful tools will be part of its "Music Pro" add-on. Where recent rumors of a new top "Supremium" tier fit in is unclear.
The intended price of the premium add-on has not been revealed, but given that major rivals include lossless in their standard plans, expecting subscribers to pay anything more than a nominal fee may be a big ask.
Article Link: Elusive Spotify Lossless Option May Arrive as Paid 'Music Pro' Add-on
With that said, I have all the necessary equipment with audio interfaces and studio monitors. I am one of those nerds.
Mostly we've gone backwards. Ubiquitous true CD quality would be an actual improvement over the majority of music listening experience these days.
I’m sorry, you can’t tell the difference between flac files and Spotifys current compressed garbage? Yes you can. Even the most casual listener like my wife can tell the difference. I a/b a track for her the other day and she was astounded at how bad Spotify sounded compared to a flac file of the same song.
In the same boat. It seems with Audio the diminishing returns happen quickly. I've tried all the different streaming companies and there is such a minute difference that if my mind drifts anywhere but the music currently playing I lose gains.
I've been trying to slowly back pare back my audio setup to just what's needed for happiness. The biggest quality bump I've found with music is going from a music service to vinyl. But with all things audio, the "better" quality is entirely subjective.
Probably because they know they will lose money with each subscription (which is likely what Spotify is experiencing).
It makes sense when you think about it. Apple Music is marketed towards iPhone users who tend to have more disposable income and who come from countries where they pay the full $10/month. Part of the reason why Apple is so successfully financially is because they don't give away stuff for free or at a heavily discounted rate just to build up market share.
I have to ask, if you can't tell any difference, then why are you spending so much money and effort on gear and lossless files?
Joke of a company, they spend more time b***ing and complaining than they do developing new features for their customers.![]()
Spotify's elusive lossless music experience is being teased again, this time based on code uncovered by The Verge in recent builds of the Spotify app for Android.
![General-Spotify-Feature.jpg]()
More than three years have elapsed since Spotify announced its intention to offer a "HiFi" premium option that would give users access to a catalog of CD-quality music tracks. Originally the company said the tier would go live by the end of 2021, but a shift in the wider streaming market upended that idea.
Apple Music has since rolled lossless listening into its standard subscription price, while Amazon stopped charging extra for its lossless music library. The moves effectively kiboshed Spotify's original strategy of marketing an exclusively lossless HiFi tier.
That said, it doesn't sound as if lossless is coming as a free perk. The latest rumors suggest that Spotify now aims to offer lossless audio playback in an optional "Music Pro" add-on that will also include new DJ remix features, which let subscribers "speed up, mash-up, and otherwise edit" tracks from their favorite artists, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Spotify will likely make some basic remixing tools available as part of its Premium subscription (currently $10.99 a month, or $5.99 for students), but more powerful tools will be part of its "Music Pro" add-on. Where recent rumors of a new top "Supremium" tier fit in is unclear.
The intended price of the premium add-on has not been revealed, but given that major rivals include lossless in their standard plans, expecting subscribers to pay anything more than a nominal fee may be a big ask.
Article Link: Elusive Spotify Lossless Option May Arrive as Paid 'Music Pro' Add-on
Unless you’re talking about some fly by night bargain basement release, or bootlegs, commercial CDs contain uncompressed PCM, which is the definition of lossless. It’s not high resolution, but it is 16/44 lossless. The output on a CD, and with 16/44 FLAC/ALAC files, is bit for bit identical with the input. This is not the case for MP3, AAC, MQA and other lossy perceptual encoders, which remove portions of the data algorithmically that are meant to be out of the human perceptual range, so the output is not the same as the input. That is why they are lossy and CDs are lossless.
High resolution is a different thing altogether, higher bit depth and sample rates than CD, but if you fed a high resolution file into an AAC encoder the resulting file would still be lossy, because it’s the encoder which is determining if the music is lossy or lossless.
As to whether or not humans can perceive the difference between lossy and lossless, I find that to be a completely pointless argument. The fact is that lossless is the only way to ensure the data you’re getting is identical to the original data. Would anyone spend money on a cloud storage service that guaranteed it would save up to 85% of the data on each file you store in it?
Lossy codecs were extremely useful when storage was expensive and not plentiful and WAV and FLAC files were too costly for the average person to store. That is no longer the case and there is very little argument for keeping them now. Bandwidth concerns are silly too given that we all stream video regularly, which is larger than even the largest hi-res audio files by a significant margin.
No service should be making you pay extra for lossless, it should be the de facto standard.
Lossy codecs were extremely useful when storage was expensive and not plentiful and WAV and FLAC files were too costly for the average person to store. That is no longer the case and there is very little argument for keeping them now. Bandwidth concerns are silly too given that we all stream video regularly, which is larger than even the largest hi-res audio files by a significant margin.
No service should be making you pay extra for lossless, it should be the de facto standard.
I'm all for transcoding into a lossy format if the application and situation call for it, but yeah 100% agree that all audio should be lossless when at rest.
That's how I feel about Dolby Atmos. There's many AV Receivers with Spotify baked in. I wonder if the one I have will support it.
Yes, there are use cases where lossy encoders can still be useful, but those should be determined by the end user, not the service provider.
I would not mind if Apple Music switched over to lossy automatically, if say I was in a location with exceptionally bad cell signal that couldn't support the 1200kbps or whatever ALAC runs at in practice. I'd like for that to be indicated to me somehow, but I'd rather not have to explicitly switch it myself... personally.
Spotify annouced plans to raise prices by $1 to $2 earlier this month while introducing a new Basic plan at the $10.99 price point currently occuppied by the Premium plan.
Your streaming is about to cost more: Spotify price hike is on the way says Bloomberg
Spotify plans to raise subscription prices in the U.S. later this year, according to a report from Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter.
www.usatoday.com
That would mean the Premium plan goes up to $11.99 or $12.99 while a lossless "Supremium" plan is at least $13.99
I mean they pretty much created the legit music streaming industry, by doing the herculean feat of convincing the record labels to distribute music like this (who were still hoping to sell individual songs/cds).
This in turn made the iPhone into a more compelling device, likely boosting sales and market adoption.
Apple only recently decided to piggy back on this, with others doing the heavy lifting (convincing the labels, creating the market, pioneering the tech).
It makes sense from apples perspective though, because the vast majority of their revenue is iPhone so the only reasonable sizeable growth opportunity is iPhone paid services.
Was it a Herculean feat to convince the record companies to license portions of their catalogs for a majority cut of the profits, including profits on a whole lot of music that wasn’t making money for them anyway, and ensuring that people no longer own the music they like so they’re dependent on these services to provide it to them, at a monthly cost?