The saga of Spotify HiFi has many twists and turns. First announced over three years ago, the music service’s higher-quality streaming tier has still yet to materialize. Recent reports have said lossless audio will be bundled together with 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 offered no firm timetable as to when it’ll be available.
In what might be my favorite-ever use of a cliche tech industry phrase, Ek said the effort is still “in early days.” (For those keeping score at home, it has been 1,247 days since Spotify first announced HiFi.) “The plan here is to offer much a much better version of Spotify,” Ek said. “Think something like $5 above the current premium tier. So it’s probably around a $17 or $18 price point, but sort of a deluxe version of Spotify that has all of the benefits that the normal Spotify version has, but a lot more control, a lot higher quality across the board, and some other things that I’m not ready to talk about just yet.”
That pricing would match Bloomberg’s estimates of the tier costing around $5 extra on top of Spotify’s $11.99 monthly rate. Whatever final form Spotify’s lossless audio ultimately takes will be much different than what the company first envisioned. By all indications, Spotify was caught flat-footed when Apple and Amazon began offering higher-resolution audio as part of their standard subscription plans. The leading music streamer had always intended to sell it for an added premium.
Those companies can be more aggressive with pricing since they’ve got numerous other divisions to help balance out any losses. Spotify isn’t so lucky, so the company has had to rejigger its plans and come up with an add-on package that will hopefully prove compelling to as many of the app’s power users as possible. Finally, the timing seems to be right.
“There’s a good subset of that group of 246 million subscribers that want a much better version of Spotify,” Ek said. “Those are huge music lovers who are primarily looking for even more flexibility in how they use Spotify and the music capabilities that exist on Spotify.”
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Bloomberg reported that Spotify aims to roll out its “deluxe” version (as Ek refers to it) later this year. So, after all this waiting, we’ve only got a few months left before we learn everything that the add-on plan entails.