Gizmodo.co.uk asks:

What would you prefer: instant streaming access to millions of tracks, or delayed access to all those tracks at a higher, lossless audio quality? That’s an issue that Spotify is currently wrestling with. Speaking to Gizmodo at the IFA conference in Berlin, the company revealed that it is “testing” lossless audio, but warned that it may be some time until it could be integrated into the service.

“We’re thinking about it all the time, but it’s a trade-off,” Spotify’s global head of hardware partnerships, Pascal de Mul, told Gizmodo.

“If we go for lossless, would we be able to deliver the same instant experience that Spotify gives? If we could [be high-resolution and instant], we would.

“At the moment, we don’t think we can do it. We’re testing it, we’re looking at it, but we don’t want to go back to that pre-Spotify time where you’d double-click on a track and you see a little timer going, and only after five seconds the music starts. That’s an experience we don’t really believe in.

“At some point, of course, we will go to lossless. Whether that’s in 2020, 2030, 2040, it depends on bandwidth and how quickly we can upscale that.”

Read more at http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2014/09/spotify-is-testing-lossless-audio/