How Apple Lossless Audio Challenges Streaming Rivals

When every major music-streaming provider offers the same catalog of songs from almost all of recorded music’s history, how can they compete? One way is on price, such as Spotify Technology SA’s free, ad-supported tier; another is to bundle other products, like Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime. But a more technology-based approach is to make the music itself sound better, and Apple Inc. is venturing into this territory with its lossless, high-resolution, and spatial audio.

To understand the concept of lossless, it’s easiest to first grasp its counterpart, the MP3 file. When a song is copied from a CD to computer, it’s usually encoded by default in MP3 or the comparable AAC. In doing so, the software performing the copy is analyzing the sound and determining which bits of it the human ear is unlikely to be able to hear — very high and low frequencies, for instance, or two similar sounds occurring simultaneously. Such audio files will discard what a person won’t hear or won’t notice missing. This creates files that take up less space on a hard drive and download or stream more quickly. Lossless technology doesn’t throw any of that data away — whether you can hear it or not, the audio is sonically identical to its source, whether that’s a CD or a studio master recording.