Spotify is Keeping its HiFi Plan on Hold Due to “Industry Changes”
- Laurent Giret
- Mar 15, 2023
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Spotify’s HiFi tier is still nowhere to be seen after the company announced it two years ago, and we finally know why. In an interview with The Verge, Spotify co-president Gustav Söderström hinted that it may not make sense for the company to offer better audio quality at a premium while the competition already does so at additional cost.
“We announced it, but then the industry changed for a bunch of reasons,” Söderström told The Verge. “We are going to do it, but we’re going to do it in a way where it makes sense for us and for our listeners. The industry changed and we had to adapt.”
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The exec didn’t explicitly say which industry changes he was referring to, but he emphasized that cost was an important issue. “We want to do it in a way where it works for us from a cost perspective as well. I’m not allowed to comment on our label agreements, nor on what other players in the industry did, for obvious reasons,” Söderström said.
According to The Verge, Spotify HiFi has been “ready to go for more than a year,” and the company has already made the work to make its entire music catalog available in lossless quality. In its initial announcement for Spotify HiFi, the company said that the new tier would “deliver music in CD-quality, lossless audio format to your device and Spotify Connect-enabled speakers.”
However, Apple Music, which remains the biggest competitor to Spotify already offers lossless audio as well as Dolby Atmos audio on many albums at no additional cost. Amazon Music Unlimited is another service that offers music in lossless or 3D audio at no extra cost.
In the video streaming market, Netflix is the rare service to restrict 4K quality and HDR/Dolby Vision to its $19.99 Premium plan. Maybe Spotify enjoys enough brand loyalty to do the same thing with its HiFi plan and get away with it without too many complaints.
Spotify never said how much it would charge for its HiFi plan, but the company likely can’t go high above the $9.99/month bar. The company is also likely aware that some services now make it quite painless to bring your entire music collection to another service and never look back.