Has Amazon set the price ceiling for hi-res music streaming? When it launched its Amazon Music HD tier in September 2019, it set the price at $12.99 for Prime members and $14.99 for everyone else. Now Deezer has announced that its Deezer HiFi tier, which previously cost $19.99 a month, has been permanently reduced to $14.99 (€14.99 / £14.99 / etc depending on the market).
Existing subscribers will automatically be switched to the lower price. There’s still a 30-day free trial, and subscribers can use Deezer’s standalone ‘360 by Deezer’ app for no extra cost. Is $14.99 a month now the standard for hi-res music streaming, then?
Earlier this year, Amazon Music VP Steve Boom told Music Ally that there was evidence that this price appealed beyond the customers his company had expected to bite at. “Our initial anticipation going in was that it would be almost all upgrades: people that are already subscribing to Amazon Music Unlimited,” he said. “‘OK, $5 more, I’ll upgrade to the HD tier. And what we’ve actually seen is a significantly higher percentage than we anticipated of people who are going straight from not even being an Amazon Music customer, or just using Prime Music, to going straight to the HD tier.” At a time when calls for standard $9.99-a-month tiers to cost more are growing, it’ll be interesting to see how $14.99-a-month fares for HD.
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