[StackRanker3000]

Spotify offers lossless now. But before that the highest quality was 320 kbps AAC, and if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier (and in that case, sure - go for the lossless option)

You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride

I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I don’t really think those are among them. I’ve had it for about 15 years, and I’ve been consistently happy with it for my own use

[dTal]

>if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier

Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.