At the time, Spotify said that HiFi would launch “later this year” and that it would have “more details to share soon.” Yet we’ve started a whole new year, and Spotify HiFi is still nowhere to be seen. A few days ago, the company made one of its first comments about lossless since its original announcement. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news. Instead, Spotify provided an update on its community forums that suggests HiFi i isn’t close to launching. In other words, the feature will launch eventually, but the fact that Spotify isn’t even able to provide a rough timeline for arguably its most anticipated feature doesn’t look good. Unless Spotify is being coy, “in the future” isn’t likely to mean “soon.” We reached out to Spotify for comment on this update but had not heard back by the time of publication.
First things first, I want to make clear that this entire article is speculation and opinion, and there’s every possibility I could be flat out wrong. I’m not sourcing any insider knowledge, just connecting the dots. But from where I’m standing, those dots aren’t too hard to connect. When Spotify announced its HiFi tier, it seemed all but certain it would come with a higher price tag than its Premium tier. As far as I know, the company didn’t explicitly say that there would be a price bump, but it was described as an “add-on” the language suggested as much: The whole “be able to upgrade” bit is indicative that this would be an optional upgrade. In any case, at the time, this was the norm, as lossless streaming services typically cost $15-20 bucks a month, rather than the $9.99/mo typical of standard streaming music. Suddenly, charging more for hi-fi audio just seemed silly. (Mind you, I do think paying more for your music is a good thing if that money goes back to the artists, but that’s a topic I’ve written about elsewhere.) But here’s the thing: even if Spotify did plan to make HiFi a free upgrade, it would have been a comparatively weak deal; Spotify only promised audio up to 16-bit/44.1 kHz, not the high-res 24-bit/192 kHz tracks of its competitors. You can bet that if Spotify was aiming for high-res, its marketing would have reflected that from the get-go. The delay sucks for audiophiles who have remained loyal to Spotify, but the good news is I expect that patience will be rewarded. While before we were only promised an upgrade to CD-quality audio, I would now be really surprised if Spotify HiFi’s eventual launch didn’t include high-res tracks up to 24-bit/192kHz and some form of spatial audio as well. Who knows, maybe there’ll even be some extra freebies.
