In February 2021, Spotify announced a new subscription tier called Spotify HiFi. The company said it would offer lossless audio (compared to the compressed audio quality you get with the other subscription tiers), and that it would launch sometime in 2021.
Roughly 11 months later, the company still hasn’t launched Spotify HiFi. Worse, there’s no launch date in sight.
In an answer to a user query on the official company forums (via MacRumors), a Spotify rep wrote the following:
“We know that HiFi quality audio is important to you. We feel the same, and we’re excited to deliver a Spotify HiFi experience to Premium users in the future. But we don’t have timing details to share yet.”
The wording here is important; initially, it seemed that Spotify HiFi was going to be a separate tier that costs extra. But it now appears that HiFi is going to be another perk for users that pay for the $9.99 Premium tier.
While it’s never too late for an upgrade like this, it’s worth noting that essentially all major Spotify competitors, including Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music, offer lossless quality audio.
Right now, the best quality you can get on Spotify is compressed audio “equivalent to approximately 320kbit/s.” Lossless audio quality typically means CD quality, with no audio details lost; the difference may not be apparent on every audio system, but it will show on higher quality systems and headphones.
