On September 10, 2025, Spotify switched on Lossless for Premium subscribers — up to 24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, across nearly its entire catalogue, at no extra cost, rolling out to more than 50 markets over the following month. It was the loudest lossless-audio announcement in years. For the large majority of people who heard it through a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, it almost certainly changed nothing about what they actually heard.
The chain has a weak link, and it isn’t the file
Bluetooth doesn’t transmit a lossless file as a lossless file. Whatever format the music arrives in, standard Bluetooth audio profiles re-encode it into a lossy codec for the trip from phone to earbuds — SBC on the low end, AAC or aptX on better hardware, LDAC on the small slice of devices that support Sony’s higher-bitrate option. A FLAC stream from Spotify and a standard 320kbps stream hit that same bottleneck and come out the other side compressed either way. The upgrade Spotify shipped is real at the source; what most listeners’ hardware does with it afterward is a separate question entirely.
Apple has said as much directly, if not framed around Spotify specifically. Esge Andersen, an engineer on Apple’s acoustics team, told What Hi-Fi? in 2022 that "we don’t think that the codec currently is the limitation of audio quality on Bluetooth products" — explaining that Apple’s codec choice "is more about reliability... making something robust in all environments," and that the company sees more room to improve sound quality through other engineering than through swapping codecs. That’s a three-year-old quote from one company’s engineer, not a universal law, but it lines up with what the codec math already suggests: the bottleneck most people are listening through isn’t really about lossless versus lossy at the source.
What blind testing actually shows
None of this means codecs are interchangeable in every condition. Controlled ABX listening tests — where a listener has to correctly identify an unlabeled sample as A or B — have found that trained listeners can reliably distinguish something like LDAC at 990kbps from SBC at 328kbps, picking out differences in stereo width, high-frequency detail, and dynamic range. That gap is real under lab conditions, with good source material and a quiet room.
It narrows fast outside the lab. Commuting, exercising, working with background noise running — the conditions most Bluetooth listening actually happens in — bring ambient noise, movement, and inconsistent earbud fit into the signal path, all of which erode the same details a trained ear can pick out of a quiet-room ABX test. Combine that with a phone or laptop speaker instead of headphones at all, and whatever the source file’s bit depth was stops being the thing limiting what you can hear.
So who is lossless actually for
The honest version of this isn’t "lossless is a scam" — it’s that lossless delivers on the setups built to carry it end to end: a wired connection, or a Bluetooth codec good enough not to bottleneck it, paired with headphones or speakers resolving enough to make the difference audible, in a listening environment quiet enough to hear it. That’s a real, specific setup, and Spotify’s and Apple Music’s lossless tiers are aimed at people who already have it. For the far larger group of people listening through basic Bluetooth earbuds on a commute, the upgrade is happening somewhere upstream of their ears — which is a fine reason to have it turned on by default, and not much of a reason to expect it to sound different.