Spotify Lossless is the platform’s highest audio quality setting, streaming in FLAC at up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz. It’s included with Premium at no extra cost, and it arrived in September 2025 after being announced as “Spotify HiFi” back in 2021 and then going quiet for four years.
Turning it on takes about fifteen seconds. Getting any actual benefit from it takes slightly more thought, and that second part is where most coverage stops short.
What lossless actually means
Ordinary streaming uses lossy compression. Spotify’s standard tiers use Ogg Vorbis, topping out around 320 kbps at Very High. Lossy codecs shrink files by discarding audio data judged inaudible — a psychoacoustic bet that’s mostly correct and occasionally not, particularly on cymbals, reverb tails, and quiet detail buried under louder sounds.
FLAC compresses without discarding anything. It works like a ZIP file for audio: smaller in storage, bit-for-bit identical to the source when decoded. Nothing is thrown away, and nothing is guessed at.
The two numbers attached to it:
Bit depth (24-bit) governs dynamic range, the gap between the quietest and loudest sounds a recording can hold. CD is 16-bit. 24-bit is the studio standard.
Sample rate (44.1 kHz) is how many times per second the waveform was measured. 44.1 kHz is CD standard and covers the full range of human hearing.
So Spotify Lossless is CD quality or slightly above. It’s a real, measurable upgrade over 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis.
Worth setting expectations honestly: Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Qobuz all go to 24-bit/192 kHz. Spotify’s ceiling is lower on paper. Whether anyone can hear the difference between 44.1 kHz and 192 kHz is a genuinely contested question among people who test this properly, and the evidence for audibility is thin. The jump from lossy to lossless is the one that shows up in listening tests. The jump from 44.1 to 192 mostly doesn’t.
What you need
Premium. Any tier — Individual, Duo, Family, or Student. Free accounts can’t access it. There’s no separate HiFi add-on, which was the original plan in 2021 and got scrapped.
A supported market. Rollout began 10 September 2025 in an initial wave and expanded to more than 50 markets through October. The list covers the US, UK, Canada, most of Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. Notably absent are India, Brazil, Mexico, and essentially all of Africa. Spotify hasn’t explained the exclusions; the widely held theory is that lower-priced markets were deprioritised for an expensive feature.
A current app version. Lossless works on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The web player does not support it and remains capped at 256 kbps AAC on Premium.
Even inside supported markets, Spotify rolled out gradually via A/B testing, so accounts in the same country got it at different times. If you’re in a listed market and don’t see the option, update the app first, then wait.
How to turn it on
- Open Spotify and tap your profile icon, top left.
- Go to Settings & Privacy (just Settings on desktop).
- Open Media Quality.
- Set your preferred quality for each context: Wi-Fi, Cellular, and Downloads.
The separate contexts are genuinely useful rather than clutter. A sensible configuration for most people is Lossless on Wi-Fi, High or Very High on cellular, and High for downloads.
Spotify displays the data usage for each tier as you select it, which makes the trade-off concrete.
The part people miss: you have to enable it separately on every device. Turning it on for your phone does nothing for your laptop, tablet, or a Spotify Connect speaker. This catches a lot of people who switch it on once and assume they’re done.
To confirm it’s working, start a track and check the Now Playing screen or tap the device icon in the Connect menu. A Lossless indicator appears, showing the current file quality and the data rate per hour.
Downloads need re-downloading
Downloaded tracks play at whatever quality they were downloaded in. Switching the Downloads setting to Lossless does not upgrade anything already saved.
To get lossless offline files, remove your existing downloads and download them again. Settings, Storage, Remove all downloads, then re-add what you want.
Think carefully before doing this on a phone. Lossless files run roughly 27 MB for a four-minute track, against about 9.6 MB at Very High and 4.8 MB at High. A thousand songs is around 27 GB at Lossless versus 4.8 GB at High. On a phone with wireless earbuds, you’d be spending 22 GB to hear something functionally identical. The full storage breakdown has the per-library math if you want to plan it out.
Bluetooth undoes it
This is the single most important thing in this article, and it’s the reason a lot of people conclude lossless is a marketing exercise.
Bluetooth doesn’t have the bandwidth to carry lossless audio. Standard codecs — SBC, AAC, aptX, LDAC — all compress the signal before transmitting it. So a lossless FLAC stream gets re-compressed on its way to your wireless earbuds, and what reaches your ears is lossy again.
You can enable Lossless, see the indicator, and be listening to compressed audio. The setting is doing exactly what it says; the last link in the chain is the bottleneck.
To actually hear lossless:
Wired headphones or speakers. Straight from the headphone jack, or through a USB DAC. Simplest and most reliable.
Spotify Connect over Wi-Fi. Connect streams to the speaker directly over your network rather than via Bluetooth, so the lossless signal survives. Supported devices include models from Sony, Bose, Samsung, and Sennheiser, with Sonos and Amazon devices added after launch.
Wi-Fi-based wireless headphones, including those using a 2.4 GHz dongle rather than Bluetooth.
On desktop, route output to a proper DAC and enable Exclusive Mode on Windows so the operating system’s mixer doesn’t resample the audio on its way out.
If you listen primarily on AirPods or similar, Lossless will not deliver lossless audio to you. That isn’t a criticism of the feature, it’s a limitation of Bluetooth, and it applies identically to Apple Music, Tidal, and everyone else.
Will you actually hear a difference?
Depends on three things, in roughly this order of importance.
Your connection type. Covered above. Bluetooth means no.
Your equipment. On phone speakers, laptop speakers, cheap earbuds, or in a car, the difference is inaudible. On decent wired headphones or a proper speaker system in a quiet room, it’s noticeable — usually described as more space around instruments, cleaner cymbals, and better separation in dense mixes.
The recording. Sparse acoustic music, classical, and jazz reveal the difference most. Heavily compressed modern pop mastered loud reveals it least, because the mastering already discarded the dynamic range lossless preserves. A track squashed for radio sounds nearly identical at 320 kbps and FLAC.
Test it properly if you’re curious: same track, same headphones, switch between Very High and Lossless, listen for the tail of a cymbal or reverb decaying into silence. That’s where lossy codecs make their compromises.
And don’t buy audio equipment because a settings menu now offers a new option. If you were happy with your setup last month, you’ll be happy with it this month.
Data usage
Lossless uses substantially more data. Spotify recommends a steady connection of 1.5 to 2 Mbps.
Roughly per hour: about 72 MB at High, around 144 MB at Very High, and somewhere near 400 MB at Lossless, varying with the music since FLAC compression is content-dependent.
Three hours of lossless streaming on cellular is over a gigabyte. If you’re on a metered plan, keep cellular set to High or Very High and reserve Lossless for Wi-Fi. That’s exactly why Spotify split the settings by context.
You may also notice tracks taking a moment longer to start, since a bigger buffer has to fill first.
What’s not included
Podcasts, audiobooks, and music videos are not available in lossless. Music only.
The web player stays at 256 kbps AAC on Premium.
Spatial and Dolby Atmos mixes are not part of this. Spotify’s lossless rollout is stereo FLAC. Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon have spatial catalogs; Spotify currently doesn’t.
Not literally every track. Spotify describes coverage as nearly every song, which means some catalog entries are still served at lower quality depending on what the rights holder supplied.
What happened to Spotify HiFi
Worth a short detour, because the naming confuses people searching for this.
Spotify announced “Spotify HiFi” in February 2021 as a paid add-on tier, promising CD-quality audio to subscribers willing to pay extra. Then nothing happened for four years. The feature vanished from public communications, executives deflected questions about it, and it became a running joke among subscribers who’d been waiting.
When it finally arrived in September 2025, two things had changed. The name was simply “Lossless,” and it was included in standard Premium rather than sold separately. Rivals had shipped lossless at no extra cost in the intervening years, which made a paid tier commercially untenable.
So if you’re searching for how to subscribe to Spotify HiFi, or looking for a HiFi upgrade in your account settings: there isn’t one. The feature exists; it’s called Lossless, and you already have it if you’re on Premium in a supported market. Nothing needs buying.
How it compares to other services
Useful context if you’re deciding whether Spotify’s version is enough, or whether the specialists are worth moving for.
Apple Music offers ALAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz, included at the same price, plus a large Dolby Atmos catalog. On paper it’s the better spec at identical cost. It also has the strongest built-in tool for importing a library from elsewhere.
Tidal streams FLAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz and has long marketed itself on audio quality and artist payouts. Smaller catalog.
Qobuz goes to 24-bit/192 kHz and is the specialist choice for classical and jazz, with detailed liner notes and the option to buy tracks outright alongside the subscription.
Amazon Music Unlimited reaches 24-bit/192 kHz on its HD and Ultra HD tiers, included in the standard price, and is a strong deal if you already have Prime.
So Spotify’s 44.1 kHz ceiling is the lowest of the group. Two things temper that. First, the evidence that anyone can reliably hear above 44.1 kHz in blind testing is weak, so the spec gap is larger on the page than in the room. Second, most people stay with Spotify for the recommendation engine and the social layer rather than the audio, and those don’t transfer. If you’re tempted to switch on specs alone, be clear-eyed that you’d be trading discovery quality for a difference you may not hear — though moving playlists across is straightforward now if you decide it’s worth it.
If the option isn’t there
Update the app. Old versions don’t show it regardless of eligibility.
Check your market. If your country isn’t in the rollout list, the toggle won’t appear, and there’s no workaround worth attempting.
Wait. Even in supported markets the rollout was staged. Spotify sends an in-app notification when your account becomes eligible.
Check your plan. In markets where Spotify tested a Premium Platinum tier, Lossless was initially limited to that plan, producing an error prompting a plan change.
Confirm you’re actually still on Premium. A lapsed payment silently drops the account to free, at which point the highest available option is High, and downloads stop working too. That situation causes several other confusing symptoms people usually misdiagnose as app bugs.
Is it worth switching on?
Yes, with one qualification.
If you’re already paying for Premium, it costs nothing, and there’s no reason not to enable it for Wi-Fi listening. Even if your gear can’t fully resolve it, you lose nothing.
The qualification is about downloads. Setting Downloads to Lossless on a phone consumes storage at five times the rate for a benefit you almost certainly can’t hear through Bluetooth earbuds. Enable Lossless for Wi-Fi streaming, keep downloads at High, and revisit that decision only if you’re plugging into real hardware.
The four-year wait produced something solid rather than something revolutionary. It’s the same catalog, the same price, and a real improvement at the top of the chain — provided you don’t compress it again on the way out.