Spotify Lossless

Our experts have tested Spotify Lossless – was it worth the four-year wait?

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While Spotify has continued to pioneer the streaming experience with innovative discovery features, its growth of podcasts and audiobooks and the pop culture hit Spotify Wrapped, the agonising wait for higher-quality audio, plus a string of price hikes, ultimately saw its value wane next to its better-sounding competition.

With the arrival of much-improved sound quality completing what is an otherwise near-faultless streaming offering, it's time to reevaluate Spotify with its new Lossless tier.

The audio quality cap is significantly higher with Lossless providing hires listening up to 24-bit/44.1kHz in FLAC quality. Spotify Connect allows Premium subscribers to cast the catalogue directly to the vast majority of wi-fi-enabled speakers, TVs and audio systems. Spotify has also gone pretty heavily into personalisation and AI functions that allow subscribers to, for example, add transitional effects between songs, create their own playlist cover art, and generate their own AI-curated playlist simply by typing in their genre and mood or other prompts.

A standard individual Premium subscription is £12.99 per month, a student subscription is available for £5.99; Spotify Duo gives two people living under one roof Premium accounts for £17.99; Premium Family covers up to six people for £21.99 per month. That makes Spotify's paid-for Premium subscriptions more expensive than those of its closest competitors. Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tidal charge £10.99 per month for their Individual plans.

The immensity of Spotify's catalogue has historically won the service points for being the world's biggest. Its current claimed “100 million-plus”, though, is more or less parity with the other major services. Where Spotify's catalogue stands out from its rivals' is in its podcast and audiobook offerings, which are significantly more comprehensive and integrated.

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