Spotify Hi-Fi – An Oxymoron?
Spotify has officially announced its lossless Hi-Fi streaming tier as a Premium add-on to its compressed Ogg Vorbis service. Considering the competition for HQ audio services I was a little surprised when they announced that this new premium service is to only provide “lossless CD-quality streams”! Which I assume to mean 48KHz/16bit audio which would equate to an uncompressed stream of approximately 1411Kbps or slightly lower at about 850Kbps using FLAC, which is without doubt a lot better than its current 320Kbps premium service. Now lets be honest here, I am not too sure how that stacks up against the HQ streaming services from the likes of Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer and Amazon HD with Apple joining the game soon. Some of these services can stream up to 96KHz/24bit audio. True to say that you have to pay extra for those additional bps.
The Spotify HiFi service will start later this year and will be available as an upgrade to Premium subscribers in select markets. Pricing isn’t yet announced but it is rumored that it might be an additional $10 on top of the basic service, making for a monthly charge of $20.00.
Image Credit: Spotify
Spotify has commented that “high-quality music streaming has consistently been one of the users’ most-requested features” and to support the launch they enlisted the help of Billie Eilish to act on Spotify’s behalf during the company’s Stream On livestream event.
To learn a little more listen to American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and record producer FINNEAS discuss the importance of higher-quality audio for creators and fans.
This new service is going to be initially rolled out to a limited number of territories, which is quite common for new offerings. What hasn’t been announced yet is what those territories are, when the CD-quality Hi-Fi service will start and of course the million dollar question, how much it will cost. The good news in all this is that if your equipment or speakers already support Spotify Connect then when you subscribe to Spotify Hi-Fi you will not have to do anything extra to hear that higher quality audio.
The Competition
There is currently a lot of competition for Spotify’s new Hi-Fi streaming service so how successful it is at attracting new customers will probably depend upon the all-important price point. Amazon Music HD costs $19.99 per month, Tidal’s lossless hi-res level (1411 Kbps) comes in at $19.99 per month, Qobuz costs $12.49 per month for its Studio Premier level offering FLAC 24-bit up to 192 kHz and Deezer Hi-Fi costs $14.99 per month. Also Apple will be announcing its own streaming service soon, but to be honest they have never gone for the “cheap” end of the market!
In the end all this competition is going to ultimately benefit the streaming consumer as all these companies battle it out in the ensuing price war.
A replay of Spotify’s Stream On event is available at Spotify.com/StreamOn and YouTube.com/Spotify.
All I can say is that this is a strange post after the last few, as visitors to my site will surely realize my enthusiasm towards this type of service and quality is less than, let us say, stellar! However, news is news, and we all need to know what our options are for higher quality audio streaming.
See my comments on MQA and Hi-Res Audio streaming and more.
