Note: I am a big proponent and long-time users of Spotify Premium.
Spotify is in no rush in upgrading their servers to maintain the bandwidth required for HiFi streaming. Here's why I think that is...
Going public on NYSE enabled their long-term investors (and employees) to finally cash out on the long-promised dreams of profitability, even though the company itself has not turned a profit since its inception. It's potential future net-worth, however, after the listing is currently somewhere around 30 billion dollars, as per the market cap determined by the public. Do note, however, that in this IPO the company did not raise any new capital (it was not underwritten by the investment banks) and simply allowed its private shares, which have already been traded among its employees in a private auction, available to the public. That means that the actual net worth of the company is not backed by its intrinsic value, but more of a future potential, which is currently determined mostly by an artificial supply and demand of the released stock.
It's not, however, all that bad. The reason that the company hasn't turned a profit is that the royalties it's paying out to the labels exceed its current income (and costs for infrastructure, employees, and other operating expenses) exceed its total revenue. Yes, even as the artists complain about the tiny checks they get in the mail for getting their music streamed to the public. Which, as an artist myself, I can say is a preposterous opposition - a decade ago an artist would give an arm and a leg to get their music played on the radio to a larger audience; today they demand a change on the distribution model that they don't truly comprehend.
But why not just turn lossless streaming on? Who knows? Perhaps the company is awaiting the gap between expenses and income to narrow to invest in the already expensive hardware infrastructure it has to support. Or, it could be simply a technical reason. Do note - that from a technology perspective, Spotify is a complex mesh of systems (whether or not outsourced to an external network and cloud provider). For direct downloads and streaming on portable devices, Spotify employes a direct point-to-point connection from their servers. But for your desktop application, it uses a protocol resembling bit-torrent, where you are actually streaming smaller chunks of data from a nearby family of other clients that have already cached it on their machines. So if someone near your regional network area has already played that Madonna track, you are most likely streaming it directly from their computer (and not Spotify hosted servers). And yes, that means that right now, as you're listening to Spotify on your desktop, you too are uploading some precached packets to many clients interested in the same music nearby. Take a look at your packet captures.
What that means for Hi-Fi streaming is that some of the upload bandwidth required to fill in those missing blocks in a distributed network is just not large enough to sustain high-resolution data (as it almost takes up nearly double the size of existing 320kbps). If your neighbour can't upload a lossless chunk to you fast enough, you will glitch, and then complain to Spotify, even though they have nothing to do with the infrastructure. So... it's possible that in order to support full lossless streaming capability (like Tidal, which I don't think employs the same distribution algorithm), the company needs to [re]invest in a more dedicated infrastructure to support its large demanding user base.
If it's not any of the above, then perhaps it's coming in 2018!!! Keeping my fingers crossed so that I can cancel Tidal 🙂
just my two cents...
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random