Spotify Will Eventually Launch Deluxe Hi-Fi Streaming Tier It has been almost three years since Spotify announced that it would introduce lossless hi-fi audio to its music streaming service.

Hi-Fi Spotify was expected to launch in early 2022, but this feature was postponed indefinitely to July 2022. Co-president Gustav Söderström told The Verge, “We are going to do it, but we are going to do it in a way that makes sense for us and for our listeners. The industry has changed, and we have had to adapt."

The company's CEO, Gustav Söderström, said, ”The industry has changed and we have had to adapt.

Spotify just recently confirmed that plans are underway, with CEO Daniel Eck confirming at the July 2024 earnings call that a deluxe tier is in the works.

Here is what we know about the deluxe plan Spotify will one day offer.

Every year since Spotify announced the arrival of lossless hi-fi audio, there have been rumors of a plan coming soon.

In June 2023, Spotify was preparing a new “Supremium” tier, rumored to launch later that year. A Bloomberg report claimed that HiFi lossless audio would be bundled into the overall feature set.

When asked about “Supreme,” Spotify told Bloomberg, “At Spotify, we are constantly iterating and developing ideas to improve our product offering and provide value to our users. However, we do not comment on speculation about possible new features and have nothing new to share at this time."

Reports in late October suggested that the Supremium would be available by the end of the year. This did not materialize.

In early 2024, something called Music Pro was seen in Spotify's code, suggesting that Supremium was gone and the possibility of HiFi add-ons was the new direction.

The latest news is that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that a Deluxe tier will be coming at the July 2024 earnings call. It will probably appear later this year, but CEO Ek declined to be more specific about the timing.

Rumors are fairly consistent on this point: Spotify's new tier is expected to cost around $20 per month. What will be offered at that cost is still up for debate.

During the aforementioned earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek suggested that this plan would be about $5 more than the current Premium tier.

“It's probably going to be in the $17 or $18 range, but it's kind of a deluxe version of Spotify with all the benefits that regular Spotify has, but with more control and overall higher quality,” CEO Ek said.

If the deluxe version with HiFi audio comes in at $17, $18, or $20, it will be the most expensive streaming plan with lossless audio. Competitors such as Amazon and Apple Music offer lossless audio for the same price (or less) as Spotify's current premium plan; Tidal offers high-res audio for $10.99, the same price as Apple Music.

Besides lossless audio, what other features is Spotify considering adding to its deluxe tier?

One report suggested that lossless audio is the only feature that comes with the upper tier.

However, the same rumor that saw the Supreme tier launching in late 2023 had more offerings on the table.

These included advanced playlist mixing tools for BPM, vibe, activity, genre, etc. AI playlist generation tools were also proposed, but Spotify announced in April for Premium users that it would be offering a text prompt based on the user's Spotify DJ feature to create radio stations for them based on text prompts.

Other features include 20-30 hours of audiobook viewing, another feature that Spotify took away from Basic users this year and paid for in Premium. However, the Premium tier only has 15 hours of listening time.

A Last.FM-style listening statistics tool was also proposed.

The rumor also mentions something called “Your Sound Capsule,” a tool that Redditor code-diver described as “telling you your listening habits and helping you discover what sound combinations are ‘you’.”

These are the only potential features we came across, and it is unclear whether Spotify will take or reduce the Premium features to make Deluxe more appealing, as it recently did between Basic and Premium.

But why all the fuss about lossless audio (sometimes called high-res audio)?

High-res audio is an audio file that sounds better than a CD; CD quality is specified as 16 bits/44.1 kHz, while high-resolution files have a greater bit depth (typically up to 24 bits) and higher sampling frequency (up to 96 kHz or up to 192 kHz).

Typically, audio files are compressed to save space and reduce sound quality. This compression reduces the immersiveness of the song.

Spotify started with a 320 kbps data stream. In contrast, CDs are 1,411 kbps. The smaller file size would have kept bandwidth costs down and helped Spotify get off the ground, but it compromised the music.

A typical lossless file has a rate of 9,216 kpbs, about six times that of a CD. This means that more audio information comes in, giving the listener more depth of sound.

To be fair to Spotify, to get the most out of lossless audio, the best headphones, best Bluetooth speakers, and best earbuds that can take advantage of the full range of frequencies and natural sound that iPhone speakers and cheap headphones cannot should be used to listen to the music.