Two years after announcing its HiFi lossless music service, Spotify has yet to launch the new tier, offering no new information and falling behind rivals
At this point, it's fair to assume that something went wrong with Spotify HiFi. Two years ago today, during the company's Stream On event … Tweets: @cambridgeaudio and @chriswelch Tweets: @cambridgeaudio : 👀 maybe 2023 is the year...? https://www.theverge.com/... Chris Welch / @chriswelch : Spotify HiFi has become one of the strangest sagas in tech. Announced two years ago today, it still hasn't rolled out. No one has reported what went wrong. Will the next Stream On *finally* bring an update? https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years ago Spotify stood up at Stream On and promised a "CD-quality, lossless" HiFi tier coming later that year; today the company has offered nothing — no launch date, no pricing, no explanation — while Premium listeners remain capped at 320kbps. Reporting a month later explained why the plan collapsed: [[a:837754|the tier was ready over a year ago, but Apple began giving lossless away at no extra charge]], destroying the case for charging a premium for it.
The saga has since stretched past a third anniversary with still no rollout, and Spotify's monetization answer — a long-discussed "super premium" plan above HiFi — has reportedly stalled too, with the company unable to settle on features or reach terms with partners. The endgame, when it finally came, confirmed the original problem: lossless shipped inside existing Premium subscriptions rather than as a paid upgrade.
First-order effects
- Spotify Premium subscribers are left paying for a service whose audio tops out at 320kbps while rivals include lossless in standard tiers — a direct competitive gap on the platform's core product.
- Spotify loses its only announced lever for raising average revenue per user through audio quality, since any HiFi-style surcharge would now be undercut by competitors' free-included lossless.
Second-order effects
- Apple's move to bundle lossless at no extra cost forced every rival's hand and trapped Spotify into matching rather than monetizing — pricing power in streaming shifted from audio fidelity to whatever comes next, hence the stalled super premium plan.
- With HiFi dead as an upsell and the super premium plan unsettled, Spotify is pushed toward feature-led differentiation elsewhere in the product rather than sound quality.
Third-order effects
- Lossless audio is completing its shift from differentiator to table stakes: when Spotify finally rolls out 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC inside existing Premium plans across 50 markets, it validates that no major streamer can charge separately for sound quality anymore.
- If that pattern holds, streaming economics will be driven by bundling and add-on features rather than bitrate tiers — a structural change that pressures every service that once planned a HiFi-style margin boost.
The trend: Music streaming is absorbing lossless audio as a free baseline feature rather than a paid tier, pushing platforms to seek revenue growth through bundles and product add-ons instead of sound quality.