There were plenty of announcements at Spotify’s recent ‘Stream On’ event, but Spotify HiFi wasn’t one of them. It was announced in February 2021 as Spotify’s imminent hi-res music tier, but has yet to launch.
After its no-show at the recent event, Spotify co-president Gustav Söderström was asked by The Verge whether it’s still coming. “We announced it, but then the industry changed for a bunch of reasons. 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,” he said. “We want to try to do something that is our own and unique.”
In a separate piece, The Verge claimed that “Spotify HiFi has been ready to go for more than a year. The technical work to bring the feature to market is largely complete, and the company has re-ingested its entire music catalog in lossless quality”. It points to Apple Music’s decision to add lossless to its service for no extra cost (and Amazon Music’s swift decision to follow suit) as the change that forced Spotify’s rethink.
Music Ally’s sense is that pricing isn’t the only industry change however: spatial audio has emerged as a key new focus for ‘higher quality’ music. An amusing interlude in The Verge’s interview with Söderström (which was for its podcast) was its unsuccessful, repeated attempts to draw him out on the topic of spatial audio. “I won’t comment on it right now. I want to save that for later,” he said. “We’ll do another episode…”
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