Spotify CEO says HiFi audio streaming is still 'in early days' after announcing it 3 years ago

Spotify first announced it was working on implementing a new "HiFi" or lossless audio quality into its product offering stack, providing consumers with an option of listening to high-quality music for a $5 increase in their monthly subscription.

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Spotify announced its development on HiFi three years ago, and since then, there hasn't really been much talk about the new service, but the company's CEO Daniel Ek, recently touched on it during an earnings call where he said HiFi will likely be bundled with other Premium-level features, such as AI-powered playlists, additional control of the application, and other unannounced features.

The bundling of these features with HiFi is likely to provide more value to a buyer who will have to pay $20/month to access this deluxe version of the music-streaming platform. Ek said despite HiFi being announced three years ago it's still "in early days" of development. Reports previously estimated the new subscription tier, which would be above the current Premium tier, would be priced around $20 as Ek said this deluxe tier would be approximately "$5 above the current premium tier".

Spotify took a substantial hit in terms of what it can offer buyers when Amazon and Apple both rolled out high-quality music streaming as part of their standard subscription plans. Spotify intended, and still plans to, sell its higher-quality music listening experience. Apple and Amazon can afford to be extremely competitive with pricing due to their multiple revenue streams. Spotify only sells streamable music, so the platform needs to provide an extremely valuable deluxe bundle to get premium subscribers to upgrade.