Music lovers have had a somewhat disappointing few months with Spotify. The company has focused almost entirely on podcasting and developing its AI DJing.
[Oye, Spotify ¿dónde está la música en alta definición que prometiste hace dos años?]
When Spotify announced it was going to introduce something big last week, some of us dared to dream it would be the launch of Spotify HiFi, the high-definition service announced in February 2021. But it wasn’t like that, and we suffered another disappointment in the form of a new interface clearly copied from TikTok.
High Definition on Spotify
Fortunately, in The edge They must have someone expecting high definition music on Spotify too, as he took advantage of an interview with the company’s co-president, Gustav Söderström, to dig a little deeper into the subject.
Although Söderström prefers to spend his interview time on topics like machine learning and podcasts, he at least decided to throw a few at us. crumbs at the insistence of the journalist. To begin with, Söderström confirmed that Spotify Hifi has not been canceled and that he will be released when the time comes; He didn’t specify when, but that alone is already more than the company has been saying all along.
Why does Spotify take so long to release something the competition has been offering for so long? Söderström tried to get away with short answers that didn’t yield much information (unlike long answers on podcasts or smartlists), but there are a few interesting points he missed.
To begin with, the leader hides behind “a change of sector”, without specifying which one, to explain why HiFi has not yet been launched.
Yes, he confessed that they want to do it in a profitable way; HD files take up more storage space on servers and require a higher transfer rate, and these are additional costs that may not make sense to Spotify with the deals it has with record labels. At least he predicts Spotify wants to do it “in its original way”, although he wouldn’t say if it would support spatial audio like other services.
Spotify HiFi works
Söderström obviously prefers not to talk too much about it, and for good reason. As revealed by sources The edge, Spotify HiFi has been ready to launch for over a yearwith all the technical aspect already completed and with all its catalog already in high quality, now accessible from employee accounts.
This is something that makes sense given that alternatives like Apple Music and Amazon Music already offer this music in high definition. But it was precisely the launch of these alternatives that was “culprit” for Spotify HiFi being delayed indefinitely.
The launch of high definition music on Apple Music upsets Spotify’s plans
Apparently the problem is that Apple offers high definition music for free and at no extra cost compared to the normal subscription. But Spotify was planning a new, more expensive subscription to access HiFi; if it had launched HiFi at the planned time, the comparison would not have been favorable to Spotify.
This is what Söderström means when he talks about “changes in the industry”: that now Spotify has more competition than ever before in the music industry. Maybe the company is developing something special to convince us to pay more, hence the constant delay.
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