Spotify finally launches lossless audio — and owns the delay with humor
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In 2021, Spotify tapped music artists Billie Eilish and Finneas to help announce the rollout of a high-fidelity audio feature, called "lossless," which would be available later that year. Months passed, but the feature didn't launch.
- Last week, lossless audio "finally" arrived.
Why it matters: The long-awaited rollout presented a tricky communication challenge, but instead of ignoring how much time had passed, the audio streamer leaned in.
Between the lines: Had the messaging followed a regular product launch playbook, Spotify would've likely been called out by its listeners — the most avid of whom had made a habit of asking about lossless in the comments of all of CEO Daniel Ek's social media posts.
- By acknowledging the elephant in the room, Spotify got ahead of internet critics and was able to own the narrative.
What they're saying: The thought process was to either lean into the joke or become the butt of it, says Spotify's co-head of communications CJ Stanley.
- "We take our products, our customers and our rollouts very seriously, but it would have come across as pretty tone deaf if we didn't acknowledge the time that had passed and lean in on humor," she said. "And we wanted to share that view in a way that was organic and felt native to audiences that were most engaged."
Zoom in: The communications team at Spotify tackled this by embracing humor across its executives' social media accounts, providing detailed FAQs across owned channels, offering influencers with early access and launching a Reddit strategy for the most engaged Spotify listeners.
- "We saw the Reddit community was counting down to the launch and had questions, and we wanted to show up in a way that felt very community-oriented and centered on those people who were invested," said Alex Pezzotti, associate director of social media at Spotify. "So we put one of our engineers on the channel to do an AMA about the launch of lossless."
- "It just felt like the right place to do more explaining and add a little bit more context and humanity to the announcement."
- Plus, as an added bonus, many of the comments were reshared across other subreddits, making the AMA a source of truth across the platform.
Zoom out: Spotify's branded social media channels — the ones owned by marketing — took a more straightforward approach to the announcement.
- The strategies were tailored to audience, with marketing speaking to all Spotify users — many of whom might not have been aware of the lossless delay — and comms focused on the influencers, media and most engaged communities.
What's next: On Friday, Finneas will join Spotify for an in-person event to "finally" celebrate the launch of lossless.
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