Spotify’s New “Exclusive Mode” May Make Your Music Sound Better, but There’s a Catch.
When digital music was just starting to gain popularity, the vast majority of us didn’t care much about sound quality. Some of the less, shall we say, legal ways to download music offered terrible sound quality, and even the best options (like iTunes) only supported MP3, a relatively low-quality codec. Times have changed: while most of us are still not audiophiles, we expect high-quality tracks from the streaming services we use—especially if we pay for them. It may not be the “gold standard,” but streaming sounds great, even with wireless headphones.
However, for those who listen to music this way, there’s a clear limit to sound quality. Bluetooth only supports 320 kbps, which is sufficient for many, but it means a loss of detail originally present in the recorded track. With the right setup, including a suitable streaming plan, you can listen to music at home in higher quality while preserving these details. Spotify may have been a bit late to the party, but it now supports lossless audio playback for Premium subscribers , which can reach up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz. With good wired headphones , you may hear finer details than you’re used to.
Now Spotify is once again offering a quality boost—at least for a very specific category of subscribers. This feature, called ” Exclusive Mode ,” is designed for Windows users to enjoy lossless audio even more. (Spotify reports that a Mac version is in development.) But while any audio quality boost sounds tempting, you probably won’t notice much of a difference.
How Spotify’s Exclusive Mode Works
According to Spotify, Exclusive Mode is designed to achieve “the perfect audio experience” on your PC. This is achieved by designating Spotify as the sole audio source on your computer. Typically, when listening to Spotify on Windows, you have various other apps and services running simultaneously that play audio through the Windows audio mixer. These could include notifications from Slack or Teams, Windows alerts, or video playback when you click a YouTube link; everything that produces sound on your PC goes through the same mixer.
Spotify claims that the music you listen to in their app may be altered before it reaches your DAC (digital audio converter), for example, by Windows upsampling, volume adjustments, or mixing in other sounds. In Exclusive Mode, all these other audio sources are muted, so Spotify’s lossless audio quality is never compromised by automatic mixing. If you’re a fan of pure audio, this can be a welcome change: you’ll be confident that the 24-bit/44.1 kHz audio you’re paying for is playing through your headphones or speakers exactly as it was when you left the Spotify app.
In Spotify’s exclusive playback mode, you probably won’t notice any difference.
However, there are some nuances and drawbacks. First, Spotify requires you to disable all other audio sources on your PC. This means that when using Exclusive Mode, you won’t be able to hear anything else on your computer. You might miss work messages or important Windows notifications if you don’t pay attention to notifications. If this doesn’t matter to you, you can ignore this issue, but it’s important to know before using Exclusive Mode exclusively. This includes playing not only music within Spotify itself, but also music videos, podcasts, previews, and clips on the canvas. These can also be played through the standard Windows audio source, in which case you’ll need to disable Exclusive Mode to use them.
Spotify claims that this feature doesn’t require a DAC or audio interface, but the best results are achieved with one. A DAC converts a digital signal to analog for output to wired headphones or speakers. Spotify says that if your computer has a headphone or speaker jack, it may have a built-in DAC, but you should check if this is the case if you want to listen to music in the highest possible quality. Otherwise, you’ll need to purchase a DAC or audio interface .
Of course, the biggest caveat is that even with the perfect setup—a DAC, excellent wired headphones, and lossless audio playback in exclusive mode—you might not notice a difference. Higher-quality audio files will certainly improve your music, but as with many media formats, the impact of improved configurations diminishes over time. Going from MP3 tracks on cheap headphones to AirPods playing 320 kbps on Spotify is a world away; on the other hand, going from the latter to wired headphones with lossless audio passing through a DAC can be downright amazing.
If you already have a similar system set up and enjoy listening to music in the highest possible quality, you might want to give this option a try. At the very least, you can see if the sound quality improves, and if not, you can disable it and restore the rest of Windows’ sound effects.
How to enable exclusive mode on Spotify
Again, this feature is currently only available to Spotify Premium subscribers in the Windows desktop app. Next, connect a DAC to your computer. (If your computer already has a DAC, skip this step.) Now open Spotify, then go to Settings > Playback > Output . Select your audio device under Device, then click the toggle next to “Enable exclusive mode for this device.”
Spotify recommends going back to your playback settings and disabling the following features in Exclusive Mode: Crossfade, Auto-Mix, Volume Normalization, and Equalizer.