Spotify Hi-Fi May Finally Arrive in 2025
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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but it seems that 2025 may actually be the year that Spotify finally announces its lossless music tier.
While we have reason to be skeptical — reports have been circulating since at least 2023 that the so-called “Spotify HiFi” tier is right around the corner — Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reports that the music streaming giant is finalizing its plans to roll out a new “Music Pro” tier later this year.
To say that Spotify is behind the curve on this one would be an understatement. The company announced plans for a premium lossless tier in February 2021, only to be pantsed by Apple three months later when it announced the entire Apple Music catalog would be going fully lossless — at no extra charge.
Spotify, of course, had planned to offer higher-quality music as a paid upgrade, similar to completing services like Tidal and Amazon Music. Apple pulled the rug out from under the entire streaming industry by going lossless quality music — and even some Hi-Res lossless tracks — on the same $9.99 monthly plan everyone was already paying for.
Amazon didn’t waste any time following suit; it eliminated its higher-priced HD tier only hours after Apple’s announcement, bringing its 70 million lossless audio tracks to all Amazon Music subscribers. That left Spotify in an awkward position, so it wasn’t surprising that the streamer got very quiet after that. Whatever the economics of its streaming business were, it clearly couldn’t afford to follow what Apple and Amazon had done, so it tried to pretend it had never announced Spotify HiFi in the first place.
By the end of 2021, the entire Apple Music catalog had been converted to lossless, and Spotify HiFi was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until early 2023 that we heard anything more when co-president Gustav Söderström told The Verge that the company was still working on “some kind of lossless experience.” Adding that its plans had been delayed because “the industry changed for a bunch of reasons.”
There’s every indication that Spotify HiFi was almost ready to go in 2021. It had reportedly worked out the technical and licensing arrangements and had even rolled it out for internal testing by employees months earlier. However, it either couldn’t or didn’t want to offer it for free like Apple and Amazon had, so the company went back to the drawing board to find other ways to beef up its offering to create a plan that delivered more value than merely lossless audio tracks.
In 2023, sources called this Spotify’s “Supremium” plan, suggesting that it would bundle “high-fidelity audio” with other perks, although it wasn’t clear then what those benefits would be. Spotify enhanced its standard Premium plans with an audiobook subscription not long after that, later adding a new
paid “Basic” plan for those who just wanted to enjoy the music and didn’t care about the books. Still, the difference between those plans was only $1 per month, separating the audiobook offering from whatever Spotify had planned for its higher-end lossless tier.
Spotify’s plans came further into focus in April when code found in Spotify’s Android app suggested the new ultra-premium tier would be dubbed “Music Pro” and would be marketed not as a separate plan but as an add-on to Spotify Premium.
Shaw reports at Bloomberg that this is expected to come later this year. In addition to lossless music, the Music Pro tier will potentially include a new remix feature that allows subscribers to mix songs from different artists, plus some features that will build on Spotify’s existing AI-generated playlists. However, it’s unclear where these will fit in.
Spotify is also “testing various ways to sell concert tickets, such as giving fans access to presales or better seats,” Shaw says, although it hasn’t finalized any plans in that area yet. Music Pro is expected to cost an extra $6 per month above the price of the Spotify Premium plan for what’s being described as a “super-fan streaming service.” The price may be lower in less-developed markets, likely in those regions where subscribers won’t benefit as much from perks like access to concert tickets.
Spotify’s Premium tier starts at $11.99 monthly after two price hikes since 2023. The Basic tier, which provides music without audiobook access, costs $10.99. While earlier reports suggested Music Pro would be an add-on, implying that it might be able to be tacked on to either of the two plans, it’s unclear whether that will be the case, and Spotify may not even have decided yet as many of the final licensing arrangements are still being worked out.
