In February 2021, Spotify announced Spotify HiFi, a premium tier service that was supposed to offer music in higher quality than Spotify’s maximum of 320kbit/s.
Then, the company did…nothing. Aside for some vague confirmations that Spotify HiFi is still coming, Spotify mostly kept silent on the matter, while literally all of its competitors started or continued to offer music in lossless (or better) audio quality. Spotify’s most recent update includes a TikTok-like redesign that angered a part of its userbase, with no mention of upgraded audio quality.
Two years later, the company finally broke the silence on Spotify HiFi. In an interview with The Verge, Spotify co-president Gustav Söderström confirmed that the company still plans to “do it,” while being astonishingly vague about what “doing it” actually means.
“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, adding that it’ll be something that is “our own and unique.”
While lossless audio quality surely isn’t a priority for all Spotify users, there’s likely a good chunk of them who’d like to see Spotify at least catch up with the competition, which includes Tidal, Apple Music, and Amazon Music Unlimited. And with Apple and Sonos recently launching speakers that support Spatial Audio, Spotify again stands out as one of the popular services that doesn’t support it.
Söderström declined to comment on whether Spotify HiFi will include spatial audio, and he wouldn’t even confirm that it would be a “lossless-type experience.”
“Something is coming at some point,” he said.
