Question: How Spotify Gets Their Music?

[hybridhighway]

Hey there! I have a question about how Spotify edncodes, recieves, and brings the music to the hands of the public.

Are original master copies sent to Spotfy's servers, where they are encoded, and then put on their database for the public to listen to,

OR...

Are encoded music files sent to Spotify to begin with?

What I'm basically trying to ask here is, does Spotify have access to the loseless, master copies of the songs on their database? Do they do the encoding? Or is Spotify just given the [MP3: 96, 192, and 320] encoded files to work with? 

Please tell me if I don't make sense, I don't know how to word this question exactly, haha 😛 

This may be quite a weird question, but I believe it's something that is vital to the future of the company; considering I'm an audophile who's bought all of his music from iTunes for the past several years, I take things like this pretty seriously. 

[adisib · Accepted solution]

Hey hybrid,

Spotify gets the master files from the artist, and then Spotify does its own conversion to lossy format.

The format that Spotify uses is OGG Vorbis (with a tiny modification to add a header that allows seeking with cache files). OGG Vorbis is one of the best lossy CODECs quality-wise and is also open source and patent free. Spotify streams at 160kbps for free users on the desktop application and web-player, and premium users can stream the 320kbps versions.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[hybridhighway]

Thank you!

[albesco]

Hi all!

Does it mean that

1) I can listen
- at the best, a good 320Kbps lossy music (Spotify client)

- at the worst, a 160Kbps lossy music (Spotify website)

2) the master are loseless source with CD quality

?!?

Thanks

Alberto