A free ‘music for everyone’ catalogue, innovative music discovery, and an interface as intuitive as they come – it’s little wonder Spotify is the world’s most popular service and has carried a five-star What Hi-Fi? verdict for more years than I have been on the team (eleven). But time waits for no man, or indeed streaming service, and as rivals such as Tidal, Apple Music and Amazon Music have blessed their subscribers with much higher-quality (hi-res) streams, Spotify has well and truly fallen behind. It was high time for me and other members of team What Hi-Fi? to revisit our Spotify review, and while we never enjoy downgrading product ratings, we felt we had to dock it a star for the first time in its 17-year lifetime.
Indeed, while Tidal (our current favourite), Apple Music and Qobuz can bask in their five-star delivery of hi-res (24-bit) streaming quality, alongside catalogues and user experiences that have more or less closed the gap on the green streaming giant in recent years, Spotify is, believe it or not, still offering the same audio quality (320kbps) it began offering Premium subscribers 15 long years ago. While 320kbps bitrates were reasonably considered “high-quality” for streams back in 2009, they are about as advanced in the streaming world today as CRTs are in the TV one.
