Solution: Everytime a track is requested by a premium member, if it does not exist in 320 then they send FLAC and the client converts it on the fly while playing it and sends it back to Spotify. Do this 3x for every track and verify that the md5 is the same on all three.<p>Then, the most popular songs will be available in 320, and the ones that aren't would never have been accessed in the first place.
In controlled listening tests most people have trouble distinguishing mp3 at 128-160 VBR kbits from the uncompressed original. 320 kbits is just a waste of bandwidth but people just assume more is better.
From Spotify's perspective, there is a low incentive to offer unpopular songs as 320kbps streams.<p>If there is only a small number of peers in the network that have the high Bitrate stream (paying users with HQ enabled on desktop clients and with interest in unpopular song X), they benefits of the peer to peer networking are less likely to pay off.<p>However, that does not explain why they don't offer HQ for some of their more prestigious releases, though I wouldn't be surprised if the labels hand them 'shitty' 192kbps mp3s every now and then.<p>Interesting read about some of their p2p architecture (PDF): <a href="http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.p...</a><p>EDIT:<p>After looking at the spreadsheet, I’d wager that there is a correlation between lower popularity of tracks and being 160 kbps only. The only track out of the last 40 is Michael Jackson's This is It, and a quick look up in the Spotify client gives most of them a very low 'popularity' measure.<p>I mean, really? <a href="http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph" rel="nofollow">http://open.spotify.com/track/7kBDTeWty0z1MXjcH9twph</a>
Spotify uses Vorbis for streaming and Vorbis' 320kbit is not the same as MP3's 320kbit.<p>In fact, MP3 has quality problems (sample/frequency resolution limit per block) that cannot be fixed at any bitrate. Moreover, re-encoding one lossless format to another (<i>edit: not what article suggests</i>) would further degrade quality. You'd get desired bandwidth, but not the quality.<p>It's a shame that bandwidth became synonymous with quality and MP3's upper limit is taken as "highest quality". 320kbit (and lossless!) WAVE sounds like a phone line! OTOH it's quite possible that Vorbis at lower bitrate has higher quality than MP3's maximum.
I think the ever-ongoing war between audiophiles and "nobody can tell 128/192/256/whatever kbps lossy files from CD" supporters is irreverent here. I am not suggesting Spotify to give us a better quality that maybe doesn't mean too much for some other users, I am asking them why they didn't deliver the goods they promised more than two years ago.
Not to start the "320kbs is better" discussion but with my Unlimited account I only heard one or two albums which sounds very compressed (spotify:album:07hc4SjPjogLqwBc7dUCiD for example: Alan Parsons). Most of the time the quality is just very good. I think the standard 160kbs is great imho.
It's not like high bit rate is the only feature of Spotify Premium. It's definitely a good feature but I ordered premium without even knowing about the high bit rate option.
I'm impressed by Spotify. 20 hours of the same sort of unlimited free music as what.cd and waffles.fm. 50 million Spotify users in the first year seems like a possibly not that unrealistic prediction for them to make. Perhaps Spotify motivates the record companies to launch and relentlessly promote their own Hulu for music. I don't think the record companies can react that quickly though. Maybe a few Swedish entrepreneurs just took quietly over (or become the prime influencers of) the US record industry.<p>@Daniel Ek: I'll sign up for the $9.95/month plan when you have 95% of your music available at ~192 kb/s OGG. I just want the slightly more bandwidth that ensures I can't tell it apart from CD and it isn't much more bandwidth.<p>Actually, what I really want is one of those menus where you got to choose your own encoding like allofmp3.com had.<p>Edit: Actually, these ads are really annoying. I guess I have to sign up. Damn you, compelling product.
well, I guess it can really be only due to bandwidth reasons. It is a lesser known fact, that Spotify (in the same way as Skype), is relying on P2P behind the scenes.<p>Often, the music you listen to is streamed from other users, and so bandwidth load is a very crucial factor. Looks like Spotify can't afford harder load to their servers and they're gradually increasing the requirements.<p>But marketing their whole library as 320kbps is really disappointing. As a premium subscriber, I was under impression that it is what I was getting.
It should definitely tell you something that he had to check file sizes to determine if the song was 320 kbps.<p>Spotify knows most users just don't care - so they don't really care either.
Some of the albums I've been listening to (with HQ enabled) have raised red flags, I've recognized compression artifacts. But I dismissed this as being deliberate, a weird sounding microphone, an effect, or whatever, since the HQ box was checked in Spotify settings.<p>Time to investigate..