Apple Music is about to sound a lot different on your Apple TV

Apple Music is a leading music streaming provider, competing with Spotify, Amazon Music and Google’s YouTube Music. There are differences between the giant companies, which is why some users point to its ease of use as one of the advantages of switching from Spotify to Apple Music. Some listeners also enjoy Apple’s lossless audio, which arguably makes it better than YouTube music in terms of sound quality. A popular feature they all offer is the ability to stream music to your TV, playing banger tunes while you do household chores, work or just hang out with friends. Still, Apple TV is hoping to stand out with a new feature for its 2nd and 3rd generation Apple TV 4K devices running tvOS 27.

In September 2026, the tech company announced that it would transition music streaming to lossless high-resolution audio support for the Apple Music app on the Apple TV, providing even more frequencies and data in the stream. According to Apple’s support page, lossless audio allows listeners to enjoy uncompromised tracks, untouched by any frequency loss. “With an Apple Music subscription, you can enable lossless audio on all your devices and hear all the preserved details of the original recording,” it says.

So if you have a newer Apple TV 4K model, but haven’t yet upgraded to Apple Music, it might be worth trying to experience the sound quality, assuming your speakers are up to par. Apple has said that tvOS will only be compatible with Apple TV 4K devices released after 2021. All older Apple TVs will be left out in this update.

Apple TV’s transition to high-resolution lossless audio for Apple Music came just five years after the service rolled it out for its entire catalog, which contains more than 100 million songs in 2026. Although some listeners may have difficulty telling the difference between high-resolution audio and lossless audio, mastering engineer Piper Payne said the former produces an untouched, high-quality listening feel. “The soul and life of the mix resides in the extra bits of data stored in the lossless file,” she said in a June 2021 Apple press release.

When Apple moved to lossless high resolution, it also added spatial audio with Dolby Atmos support to the service to generate a more immersive atmosphere. “Spatial Audio gives artists the ability to create immersive audio experiences for their fans with true multi-dimensional sound and clarity,” the company wrote.

Lossless audio is designed to reproduce 100% of an original recording despite compression, which some listeners find more pleasing to the ear. Some Reddit users have compared its sound quality to that of CDs and, for others, even to vinyl records. “(Lossless audio is) literally CD quality audio,” one user wrote. “Like the same sample rate as every CD, the same stupid CDs you played in your Chevy Cavalier in high school.”