Spotify starts streaming music in CD quality

For Premium account members

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22 June 2009 8:38 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

We brought you news that Spotify was planning to roll out new features for its "Premium" account members in an attempt to get more people to sign up for the paid-for offering, and the first new feature has now been revealed.

Those that subscribe to the £10-per-month service will now be able to listen to streamed music in CD quality.

Since Spotify launched last year, all users have been able to listen to music in what Spotify described as "very nice sounding stream of 160 kbps".

Spotify Premium users will now be able to listen to music at double the current quality - up to 320 kbps using the Ogg Vorbis q9 codec - equivalent to CD quality and apparently the highest streaming rate for any digital music service.

Premium subscribers with the latest version of the software will be able to enable higher quality streaming by going to the preferences menu and ticking the "Enable high bitrate" box.

At first it will only be the most popular tracks available at the higher bit rate, but the entire catalogue will be converted to 320 kbps over the next few weeks.