Apple's Eddy Cue Believes the Future of Music Isn't Lossless — It’s Spatial Audio

Apple Music launched a major update to its service Monday, rolling out a lossless service offering high-fidelity music and enabling Spatial Audio, a feature supported by Dolby Atmos that provides a surround sound-like experience for music listeners, at no additional charge to its subscribers.

Although lossless music has been thought to be the next big thing in the music industry for years, Apple sees it differently, positioning high-fidelity music as a “pro” feature for a limited group of audiophiles who have the proper equipment (lossless music can’t be streamed over Bluetooth which means Apple’s AirPods don’t support it) and talking up Spatial Audio as the great leap forward for consuming music. Apple is putting Spatial Audio wherever it can — it has been available for TV and films on iPhone devices since last year, and on Monday during its Worldwide Developers Conference the company announced it would bring Spatial Audio to FaceTime, its Apple TV 4K and its Macs.

Billboard had a chance to listen to Spatial Audio in Apple Music before it was released, and the quality of its offering exceeds similar services from Tidal and Amazon Music, which both offer 3D Audio tracks from Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio. But Apple has an uphill battle on its hands to make surround sound in music stick. With a limited selection of Spatial Audio tracks (Apple says Spatial Audio tracks number in the thousands, while the service offers over 75 million tracks in total) and a lot of work to do to convince the public that there’s a leap to be made in music outside of better audio quality.

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