Spotify CEO says company is in ‘early days’ of high-res audio plans

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says the streaming service is still in the “early days” of its plans to bring hi-fi support to the platform. During Earnings Call On Tuesday, the executive provided details about the upcoming luxury tier.

Spotify announced in 2021 that it would be launching a new, higher-quality subscription tier called Spotify HiFi. At the time, The company said This layer will allow users to upgrade their audio quality to a “CD-quality lossless audio format.” As of mid-2024, the company has not yet released this layer.

“The plan here is to offer a much better version of Spotify,” Ek said on the call with investors. “Think of something like $5 above the current premium tier. So maybe around $17 or $18, but kind of a deluxe version of Spotify that has all the features of the regular Spotify, but more control, much higher quality across the board, and some other things that I’m not ready to talk about yet.”

Pricing on par with Bloomberg Report Since last month, reports have revealed that the higher-priced premium plan will cost at least $5 more per month. While the plan will include the long-awaited HD audio streaming service, it is also set to include new playlist creation tools, along with additional features.

“There’s a large group of 246 million subscribers who want a much better version of Spotify,” Ek said. “These are big music fans who are primarily looking for more flexibility in how they use Spotify and the music capabilities that are on Spotify.”

Apple Music and Amazon Music have offered lossless audio streaming for years, at no extra cost. It’s unclear why Spotify took so long to launch this service, but it’s likely that the company wants to make sure it offers enough value to users to charge for this additional service, even as its competitors offer it for free.