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The Spotify HiFi saga has plenty of twists and turns. First announced more than three years ago, the music service’s higher-quality streaming category has yet to materialize. Recent reports have said that lossless audio will be included alongside other perks (like advanced library management, AI-powered playlists, and headphone sound quality optimization) as an add-on to Spotify’s premium subscription. And today, during Spotify’s earnings call, the company’s CEO Daniel Ek confirmed that a better-than-Premium offering is still in the works, though he didn’t offer a firm timeline for when it will be available.
In what might be my favorite use of a cliché tech industry phrase, Ek said the effort is still “in its early days.” (For those keeping score at home, it’s been 1,247 days since Spotify first announced HiFi.) “The plan here is to offer a much better version of Spotify,” Ek said. “Think something like $5 above the current premium tier. So it’s probably at a price point of around $17 or $18, but sort of a deluxe version of Spotify that has all the benefits that the regular version of Spotify has, but a lot more control, a lot more quality across the board, and a few other things that I’m not ready to talk about yet.”
That price would match From Bloomberg This tier is estimated to cost an additional $5 on top of Spotify’s $11.99 monthly fee. Whatever final form Spotify’s lossless audio takes, it will be very different from what the company originally envisioned. Spotify was apparently caught off guard when Apple and Amazon began offering higher-resolution audio as part of their standard subscription plans. The major music streaming service had always intended to sell it for an additional price.
Those companies can be more aggressive with pricing, as they have numerous additional divisions to help offset losses. Spotify isn’t so lucky, so the company has had to restructure its plans and create an additional package that will hopefully appeal to as many of the app’s power users as possible. Finally, it seems the time has come.
“There’s a good subset of that 246 million subscriber group that wants a much better version of Spotify,” Ek said. “Those are big music lovers who are primarily looking for more flexibility in how they use Spotify and the music capabilities that exist on Spotify.”
Bloomberg Spotify is reportedly aiming to launch its “deluxe” version (as Ek calls it) later this year. So, after all this waiting, we only have a few months left before we find out everything that the additional plan entails.