When it arrives later this year, Spotify HiFi will deliver some of your favorite songs in Lossless Hi-Res Audio, similar to what Tidal offers with its Tidal HiFi service. According to Spotify, high-quality music streaming continues to be one of the most requested new features by its users who were previously limited to 320kbps. Worse yet, people who don't have Premium get only half that (160 kbps), which is the equivalent of listening to an MP3. HiFi, on the other hand, will deliver CD-quality lossless audio at over 1411 kpbs, delivering more than four times the amount of data you currently hear when streaming a song. The service will be available in "certain markets" to begin with, and while Spotify has yet to say exactly how much the service will cost, it appears to be more than Spotify Premium's base price of €9.99/$9.99. € / AU € 11,99 per month and there is no guarantee that every song in the full Spotify catalog will have a HiFi version available. That said, while details are still a bit scant on Spotify HiFi, we've done our best to collate all available reports and bring them together in one reference guide.
Spotify HiFi release date
According to a blog post Five Things to Know About Spotify HiFi, Spotify says the new service will be available later in 2021, and will be available as an upgrade to Premium. "Starting later this year, Premium subscribers in some markets will be able to upgrade their sound quality to Spotify HiFi and listen to their favorite songs the way the artists intended." This selection of markets is worth focusing on because it means we won't be seeing Spotify HiFi live in all territories at the same time. Previously, when Spotify rolled out new features, it usually started with the United States and Europe, but now that the service is available in 80 new countries, it's hard to say who will be among the first to benefit from the new service. The other issue you'll run into for the Spotify HiFi release date is that it's unlikely all Spotify Connect devices will get the update at the same time, which means some speakers like the Sonos One and the PS5 could do it. before your slightly older AV receiver. The short answer is that the service will, to some extent, be available later this year, but which devices will be available at launch will continue to be a hot topic of conversation.
Spotify HiFi Price
At the moment, there is no fixed price for Spotify HiFi. The company says it will release more specific details later this year, so for now, all we can do is speculate. If we were to put money into it, we'd say Spotify HiFi will cost between $15-20 a month here in the US. We know for a fact that it's going to be more expensive than Spotify Premium, which is already $9,99 a month, so between €14,99 and €19,99 seems like a safe bet. Also factoring into this assumption is the competition: a Tidal HiFi subscription will cost you €19,99 per month, just like a Deezer HiFi subscription. There are some hi-res audio streaming services that charge a bit less (Qobuz and Amazon Music HD are just $14.99, for example), but Spotify is unlikely to be able to go lower than that.
High fidelity streaming quality of Spotify
So how will Spotify HiFi sound? It's supposed to sound at least as good as a CD, and maybe a little better. According to Spotify, Spotify HiFi will stream lossless CD-quality audio to your devices. Ideally, these devices will be connected to a network and will be able to use Spotify Connect; otherwise, you'll have to run it over Bluetooth, which will likely decrease quality. That's much better than Spotify's current offering of 320kbps, and will probably put the service's potential audio quality on a par with Tidal, Deezer, and maybe even Apple's Digital Masters. Speaking of Apple Digital Masters, there's always the chance Spotify could go beyond hi-fi with 96kHz/24-bit audio, but we're not holding our breath. So what does it all mean? In a very practical sense, lossless audio formats have more detail and data than their lossy counterparts. This means hearing new details in songs that you've never heard before and might otherwise have been removed when the data was compressed. It should also feel a bit bigger and more immersive, however a lot will also depend on which headphones or speakers you're using.
Spotify HiFi Song Catalog
The darkest detail of all for Spotify HiFi is the number and songs from Spotify's catalog of over 30 million songs to be included. The safest guess we can make is that it won't support every song in Spotify's vast catalogue, but millions of them should. Among these, there are likely to be top hits from the big companies that already distribute the files to other services, while some music from smaller labels and old tracks probably won't make the cut. We'll keep our ears tuned for more details on which songs will be cut, but for now it's probably best to keep your CD collection where it is until further details emerge.