Spotify snubbing spatial audio could be the smartest decision it ever makes

Type ‘Does Spotify’ into Google, and one of the top autocomplete suggestions is ‘have Dolby Atmos’. I imagine the frequency of that question being poked into the search engine has been steadily rising since May 2021, when Apple announced that it would add Dolby Atmos ‘spatial audio’ songs to its Apple Music catalogue the following month.

These songs essentially use Dolby Atmos technology as their foundation in a bid to create a more immersive, out-of-your-head listening experience than you get with traditional stereo music.

Nowadays, artists can record music in Atmos in real-time or mix it in Atmos in the post-production suite, while sound engineers can remix existing music in Atmos from their stereo (or otherwise) masters.

Apple uses Atmos alongside its own processing magic to package these into spatial audio streams for its Music service, and has integrated sensors and decoders in its AirPods so that listeners can hear spatialised music in action through their headphones.

Incidentally, that milestone rollout coincided with the music service’s launch of lossless hi-res audio. This “next generation” of Apple Music was indeed as the company pledged – the biggest sound quality advancement ever in the service’s history.

It took Spotify four and a half years to catch up on the audio quality front, having only fulfilled its promise of high-quality streaming earlier this month by launching Spotify Lossless. But the green giant still leaves one box unticked when it comes to modern streaming features: spatial audio.

No promises

Unlike with lossless audio, it has never promised spatial audio support or even publicly shown much interest in the technology. Neither has Qobuz, Deezer or YouTube Music, though Atmos-powered music is by no means exclusive to Apple Music; it can be enjoyed on Amazon Music and Tidal too.

You may spy subscriber-generation ‘Spatial Audio’ playlists on Spotify (there’s even a copy of Apple Music’s ‘Made for Spatial Audio’ playlist on there), but this doesn’t mean the service natively supports it.

In a recent Reddit AMA with one of Spotify’s engineers following the Spotify Lossless launch, Reddit users posted questions around whether the service would entertain spatial audio in the future. “Will Dolby Atmos / Spatial tracks be coming and if so then when?,” asked beastgupta. “What will really truly win me over? Dolby Atmos. Dolby, Atmos, Dolby, Atmos, Dolby, Atmos,” posted a more pleading ConflictTemporary759.

I see it discussed often on Spotify and audio forums. And when I put a similar question to Spotify recently myself, the response was simply that the company would “continue to innovate and iterate based on feedback from both users and artists”.

Is Spotify secretly working behind closed doors to bring it onboard and tick the empty box? Who (aside from those in green lab coats!) knows! If it doesn’t, though, I don’t think that’s the end of the world at all. In fact, it could be the smartest decision it ever makes.

Spatial music’s debatable value and future

I’ve written before about my own experiences with spatial audio and how the experiences differ wildly depending on both the track and how you listen to it.

One minute you can be enjoying an Atmos-fied R.E.M.’s Drive, with the enhanced echoic effect of Stipe’s vocals, the greater presence of the string section, and the empty space it all exists in emphasising the track’s melancholic tone; and the next you could be cursing the music gods that the vocal-sunken, life-drained Atmos version of Blink 182’s What’s My Age Again? made it out of the studio.

You can perceive and appreciate the beyond-your-head (by an inch or so at best) soundscape and the restructured arrangement through a pair of Bluetooth headphones; or you can be utterly blown away by imaginatively transformed mixes through a surround-sound set-up that includes overhead speakers (as a colleague has eloquently waxed lyrical about).

Unfortunately, the optimum song and system conditions are a niche that will be enjoyed by relatively few music streamers. Most will listen through wireless earbuds and headphones (ideally those with head-tracking spatial audio processing built in), through which I don’t believe the spatial music experience is convincing enough, at this stage anyway, to warrant a long, bright future.

It certainly hasn’t proven to be a convincing evolutionary replacement for stereo. You have to remember, too, that Atmos music is highly compressed; in data rate terms, it is far, far from the lossless quality stereo streaming is now available in.

Bearing this in mind, and assuming that it would be expensive for Spotify to implement, not least for such a big subscriber base, I fail to see Spotify’s omission today as a glaring one.

Clearly a number of subscribers are asking for it, whether that’s out of curiosity or a love for the technology that I don’t share to the same extent, so it will be interesting to see whether the service does decide to entertain it.

As an aside, what does seem more valuable and promising in the spatial audio world, in my experience, is the technology being applied to movies, whose very nature lends itself to the more enveloping and immersive (or ‘cinematic’) mixing principles at its very heart. But hey, that’s not a Spotify thing; that’s a Netflix thing.

Spotify subscribers can still experience spatial audio

Just because Spotify doesn’t natively support spatial audio doesn’t mean you can’t try it while listening to songs on Spotify.

Many headphones nowadays, such as Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) and Ultra Headphones, integrate hardware and software that deliver a spatialised effect for any content you play through them. Head into their system or app settings, and you’ll find a way to toggle the effect on and off.

This blanket hardware-processed trickery is, of course, a compromised experience – not the properly mixed affair intended by the artist (and/or mixing engineer) – but it can still give you a taste of spatial.

MORE:

Read our updated Spotify review

I spent the day listening to Oasis in Spatial Audio, and heard the tech at its best and worst

I swapped my music listening from stereo to spatial for a week – here are 5 things I learned

14 of the best spatial audio tracks in Dolby Atmos on Apple Music