Spotify CEO confirms a 'deluxe' edition with Hi-Fi audio is coming soon

The story of Spotify HiFi has had many ups and downs. First announced three years ago, the music service's high-quality streaming tier has yet to materialize. Recent reports said that lossless audio would be bundled with other features (like advanced library management, AI-powered playlists, and headphone sound quality optimization) as an add-on to Spotify's Premium subscription. And during Spotify's earnings call today, the company's CEO, Daniel Ek, confirmed that a better-than-Premium offering is still in the works — though he didn't say when it would be available.

In perhaps my favorite use of a cliched phrase from the tech industry, Ek said that the effort is still "in the early days." (For those keeping score at home, it's been 1,247 days since Spotify first announced HiFi.) "The plan here is to offer a much, much better version of Spotify," Ek said. “Think about $5 more than the current premium tier. So it will probably be around the $17 or $18 price, but there will be a deluxe version of Spotify that has all the benefits of the regular Spotify version, but with a lot more control, a lot more high quality everywhere, and some other things I’m not ready to talk about yet.”

That price would match Bloomberg’s estimate, which had the tier costing about $5 extra on top of Spotify’s $11.99 monthly rate. Whatever form Spotify’s lossless audio eventually takes, it will be very different from what the company first envisioned. All signs suggest that Spotify had trouble when Apple and Amazon began offering high-resolution audio as part of their standard subscription plans. The leading music streamer had always intended to sell it at an additional premium.

Those companies can afford to be more aggressive with pricing because they have plenty of other divisions to help balance out any losses. Spotify isn't so lucky, so the company had to shuffle its plans and come up with an add-on package that will hopefully attract more power users of the app. After all, the timing feels right.

"There's a good subset in that group of 246 million subscribers that wants a better version of Spotify," one said. "They're big music lovers who are primarily looking for even more flexibility in how they use Spotify and the music capabilities that already exist on Spotify."

Bloomberg reports that Spotify aims to launch its "deluxe" version (as it's called) later this year. So, after all that waiting, we have just a few months left before we find out what the add-on plan includes.