Some Spotify users might not know they can listen to high-quality songs. Spotify said that in 2021, it would start offering a membership level for HiFi music. Even though it’s been two years, there’s still no sign that the platform will get HD audio. During this time, rivals like Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited have already added lossless audio to their standard subscription plans, leaving Spotify far behind.
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What is Spotify HiFi?
When Spotify HiFi was first announced in February 2021, it said that Spotify Premium users would be able to upgrade their sound quality to a CD-quality, lossless audio format. Most online music that is CD-quality has a sample rate of 44.1kHz and 16 bits of compression.
But the critical word here is “lossless,” which means that the audio stream has the same sound information as its source. The biggest selling point is that you would hear the music the way the artist wants it to be heard.
Billie Eilish and Finneas talked about how great lossless audio streaming is in a video that Spotify shared. Right now, Spotify streams music at 320Kbps in the “lossy” Ogg Vorbis format. This means that a lot of information has been taken out of the radio stream in order to save space.
What Might Be The Release Date For Spotify HiFi?
No one knows when Spotify HiFi will come out, but at least one Spotify employee says the service is still coming. Gustav Soderstrom, one of Spotify’s co-presidents, told The Verge in March that the company will “still do” Spotify HiFi, but “we’re going to do it in a way that makes sense for us and our listeners.”
He also said, “The business changed, so we had to change too.” Soderstrom didn’t say when Spotify HiFi might be released, but he did say at some point. Before, at the beginning of 2022, the company said something about Spotify HiFi that wasn’t very clear:
“We know you care about good music. We agree, and that’s why we’re glad that Premium users will soon be able to use Spotify HiFi. We still don’t know when that will happen. We’ll tell you here as soon as we can. As soon as we heard that, we called Spotify, but a worker would only say that the company was happy that HiFi was about to start”.
All he said was about HiFi. Later, when Spotify reported its earnings for the third quarter of 2022 in October 2022, CEO Daniel Ek dodged a question about Spotify HiFi. At Spotify’s last “Stream On” event in March 2023, the function wasn’t even mentioned. In its April 25 income report for Q1 2023, Spotify didn’t talk about HiFi again. There have been other hints that Spotify HiFi is coming soon.
A post from October 2022 on Reddit says that a longtime Spotify user who recently moved to Apple Music got a survey about a new Spotify Platinum plan with HiFi and features like Studio Sound, a Headphone Tuner, Audio Insights, Library Pro, Playlist Pro, and limited-ad podcasts for an extra fee.
The Reddit user said when the question asked if they would switch back to Spotify in the next 30 days for one of these reasons. Since that Reddit post a few months ago, we haven’t heard anything about Spotify Platinum. In the Spotify app in May 2021, a “HiFi” sign was seen. A “Hi, HiFi” movie was shared and became famous a few months later.
How to Get a High-Quality Music Experience on Spotify?
Later this year, some paid users will be able to switch to Spotify HiFi and hear their favorite songs the way the artists meant them to be heard. Here are five important things you should know about our new high-quality music experience:
- High-quality music streaming is one of the new tools that our users want most.
- Songs will be sent to your computer and any speakers that can link to Spotify link in a format that sounds as good as a CD. Fans will be able to hear their favorite songs more clearly and with more depth.
- Spotify is all about making music accessible to everyone, so we’re working with some of the biggest speaker companies in the world to make Spotify HiFi available to as many fans as possible through Spotify Connect.
- HiFi will be paired with Spotify’s easy-to-use interface, keeping our promise to make sure users can listen to the music they love the way they want.
- Later this year, some places will start to get Spotify HiFi. Soon, we’ll be able to tell you more about it.
People thought that Spotify HiFi might be shown again at the company’s Stream On event on March 8. We are still waiting, but the presentation showed us a lot of tools for producers, user features, and new shows on the service, which we already knew. The website we got was more like TikTok. The company showed off a new style that you can scroll through and more shows that are only available on Spotify.
We also got the AI DJ app, which lets sets have an MC, mixes, and other changes made by computers. Both the UK and Ireland can now use the AI DJ tool. With the help of Xavier “X” Jernigan’s voice, people can find new songs. If you have Spotify Premium, the smart Selektah will recommend songs and tell you interesting things about the bands you like.
Conclusion
People won’t be able to choose “Very high” audio quality because that choice is only for Premium users. Spotify free users can also change the volume, but ‘High’ is the best choice for them. As a point of comparison, high audio quality is limited to 160kbps, and very high audio quality is about 320kbps.
Unfortunately, neither choice comes very close to Hi-Fi (CD quality), which has a bitrate of 1,411kbps. If Spotify offered HiFi music, that would be great, but people might have to pay more for it. A Premium ticket costs $9.99 per month, and an earlier story said that Spotify was thinking about a HiFi plan that would cost $19.99 per month. That is the same price as Tidal’s HiFi Plus plan, which gets you 9,216Kbps Master Quality music.
