Why does Apple Music make it so hard to play its best quality tracks?

Last week, Canadian wireless audio company Bluesound announced it had accomplished a very rare thing in the home speaker landscape: native integration of Apple Music within the BluOS app. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber who owns a BluOS-compatible speaker, streamer, or AV receiver from Bluesound, NAD, PSB Speakers, DALI Loudspeakers, Cyrus, or Monitor Audio, you can see and manage your Apple Music content alongside your other subscriptions in the BluOS app, no Bluetooth or AirPlay required.

The only problem? It’s not going to sound any better than Bluetooth or AirPlay, and in some rare cases it might sound worse. That’s because Bluesound’s integration can only access lossy, 256kbps AAC streams from Apple’s catalog. Lossy means some audio data gets thrown away to shrink the file. So there’s no lossless CD quality at 16-bit/44.1kHz, no Hi-Res at up to 24-bit/192kHz, and no Dolby Atmos Music.

That’s going to come as a real shock to Bluesound owners. One of the big reasons people choose Bluesound as a Sonos alternative, despite their similar multiroom ecosystems, is that Bluesound has offered native support for Hi-Res sources from day one. Every Bluesound component can decode audio at up to 24-bit/192kHz, while Sonos components have a 24-bit/48kHz ceiling.

We can debate the merits of Hi-Res, but there’s no question that among Bluesound’s audiophile fan base, the unwritten expectation was that when the company finally brought Apple Music onboard as a native service, it would become the best way to listen at home, thanks to Bluesound’s uncompromising Hi-Res support.

So why is Bluesound’s implementation of Apple Music stuck with the paltry 256kbps AAC version of Apple Music’s catalog? Don’t blame Bluesound. This one is on Apple.

It turns out that there’s only one officially supported way for third parties like Bluesound to access Apple Music content. It’s an application programming interface (API) called MusicKit.

Apple built MusicKit with the intent that app developers and websites could use it as a way of piping music into their experiences, as long as users had valid Apple Music subscriptions. For instance, users of the GPS app Waze who also have Apple Music accounts can control and listen to their music from within Waze, no Apple Music app needed. More recently, TikTok gave its users a similar capability.

Apple’s perspective, which seems reasonable, is that lossy AAC still sounds really good. And if you’re listening to music while doing something else (driving, playing a game, or doom-scrolling videos), you probably won’t mind that your music isn’t playing at the highest possible quality level, especially if you’re on your phone and streaming all of that extra data could come with additional cost.

MusicKit’s lossy limitation is likely why most other whole-home wireless audio companies have never bothered to use it for native integration. Bose, Sony, Denon (HEOS), WiiM: none of them have gone down this road. Eversolo is the only exception I’ve found.

I can only guess it’s because they didn’t see the point. Why integrate Apple Music via MusicKit if your users can already stream in lossy 256kbps AAC via Bluetooth or AirPlay? Yes, there are a few benefits, including universal search and playlists, plus the ability to start and manage a stream without relying on someone’s personal phone as the source. But is that enough to warrant the development work on the back end?

This brings us to the thorny question of Sonos. Sonos is the only multiroom home audio system that has a full-featured Apple Music integration, with no restrictions on resolution or format other than Sonos’ own hardware limitations. How did they do it?

When Apple Music launched in 2015, Sonos was already a home audio juggernaut. At the time, Apple’s original AirPlay technology wasn’t widely adopted (AirPlay 2 changed this when it launched in 2018 and birthed a huge swath of AirPlay speakers). Getting Apple Music onto Sonos equipment meant using Sonos’ proprietary architecture. Keep in mind, MusicKit didn’t exist yet; Apple introduced it in 2017.

To the best of my knowledge, Apple hasn’t opened up its side of this partnership to any other companies. Workarounds exist, but they fall short of a Sonos-equivalent native integration. Eversolo, for instance, lets you install the Android version of the Apple Music app on its standalone music streamers. Like the Apple Music app on any iPhone or Android device, this gives you access to lossless and Hi-Res tracks up to 24-bit/192kHz. But it doesn’t provide a path for that quality to reach any other wireless speakers in your home. And according to John Darko, Eversolo’s own native Apple Music integration, which does support multiroom, is based on MusicKit, just like Bluesound’s.

Are we stuck with this situation?

In a perfect world, Apple would open up MusicKit to let third parties stream any song at any available level of quality or format. Why it hasn’t done that already is hard to figure out, but it may be that Apple, just like Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz, would prefer that its users stay within the Apple Music app instead of using third-party apps like BluOS.

If that’s true, it may not be long until we get an Apple Music version of Spotify Connect. In practice, it would look a lot like using AirPlay, except that it would support lossless, Hi-Res, and Atmos streaming, and it would work on both iOS and Android. Since Apple has already called two different products “Apple Music Connect,” my guess is that if Apple ever creates such a feature, it will follow the same “Made for” branding it has used for its previous compatibility labels (Made for iPhone, Made for iPad, etc.). “Made for Apple Music” seems like a safe bet.

Until that day comes, Apple Music subscribers who want to hear their tunes in all their digital glory have two options, and neither plays nicely with multiroom systems.

Use your phone with a DAC/amp and headphones. Connect your iPhone or Android device to a high-quality DAC/amp (a small device that converts the digital stream into sound for your headphones) and use the Apple Music app. Your DAC/amp will get a bit-perfect stream up to 24-bit/192kHz. Since Dolby Atmos is rendered binaurally inside the Apple Music app, you’ll get that experience too, albeit as lossy audio, since Apple Music only provides Atmos Music via Dolby Digital Plus.

Use an Apple TV with an AV receiver. Connect an Apple TV 4K (2nd gen or newer) running tvOS 27, which added Hi-Res lossless support, to an AV receiver and run the Apple Music app. You can use a soundbar instead, but your TV might downsample the audio to 48kHz.

Either way, you’re listening in one room. Until Apple loosens its grip on MusicKit, the best version of Apple Music stays inside Apple’s own app.