Spotify Hi-Fi arrives but we don’t know when. Spotify still plans to roll out a lossless Hi-Fi music listening experience, though the streaming service still seems undecided about when that will happen, and what form the service will take. This even if the main competitors, read Amazon Music and Apple Music have already been offering high-quality Hi-Fi music for some time.
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It’s been more than two years since Spotify announced it would introduce a premium “HiFi” tier to give users access to a catalog of CD-quality music tracks. It originally said the plan would arrive by the end of 2021, but similar moves by rival streaming services have upset Spotify’s lossless strategy.
Since then, Apple Music has included lossless listening options as part of its standard subscription price, and Amazon has stopped charging extra for its lossless music library. This made Spotify’s idea of requiring users to pay extra for the service much less reasonable and feasible.
“We announced it, but then the industry changed for a variety of reasons,” Spotify Co-President Gustav Söderström said in an interview with The Verge in recent days, adding:
We will, but we will do it in a way that makes sense to us and our listeners. The industry has changed and we have had to adapt
We want to do it in a way that also works for us cost-wise. I am not allowed to comment on our label deals, nor what other players in the industry have done, for obvious reasons
According to The Verge, Spotify Hi-Fi has been ready to launch for more than a year and Spotify employees have access to the Hi-Fi plan, but it was originally going to cost more than the standard plan. Given the moves by Apple and Amazon, Spotify lossless is now expected to appear as part of a larger plan, which will include access to spatial audio tracks and other perks having to do with audiobooks and podcasts.
When the plan will arrive, however, is still a mystery, with Söderström only being able to confirm that Spotify Hi-Fi will “arrive at some point”.