Despite the fact that Spotify announced that its proposal for HiFi sound would arrive at some point in 2021, the months passed, the year ended and we did not hear anything more about it. In fact, this was one of the points most criticized by Neil Young after he decided to remove all his music from the platform; Well, the singer assured that he was fed up with the audio quality of Spotify, which he described as “degraded and neutralized shit”.
But it seems that Neil Young has not been the only one who you've grown tired of waiting for a high-quality audio version. From TechCrunch they say that, during a conversation with Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify; the investors behind the platform were able to inquire about the development status of Spotify HiFi. The answer, however, was not very encouraging.
Daniel Ek assured during the conversation that the company does not have much to say about HiFi mode on Spotify; however, this only caused the questions about it to be much more direct. After the words “promise” and “failure” were mentioned by investors in the discussion, Daniel Ek decided to offer a more “concrete” answer. Everything indicates that the absence of HiFi audio is related to a licensing problem.
A lot of the features we talk about, especially the music related ones, end up in licenses… So I can't announce anything concrete about it, apart from saying that we are in constant dialogue with our partners to bring it to market.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify
Ek's response at least sheds some light on the situation of Spotify Hifi. Of course, we do not know to what extent the company has control over the aforementioned licenses, but some transparency in this regard is appreciated; especially after learning that all of Spotify's major competitors now have a high-quality audio version.
Spotify is falling in the shadow of its competition in HiFi audio
Spotify
Recently, Spotify assured that its HiFi proposal will arrive sometime in 2022. However, they did not offer an approximate launch window . At the end of January, an outburst of anger about the status of the proposal was seen on the Spotify community forum. The uproar was such that a Spotify representative had to come out to calm the waters with a comment that did not add anything new to the situation.
We know that HiFi audio quality is important to you. We feel the same way, and are excited to offer a Spotify HiFi experience to Premium users in the future. But we still don't have details about the time that we can share. Of course, we'll be reporting here when we can.
Yordan, moderator of The Spotify Community
For its part, Apple Music has spatial audio and lossless sound since the middle of last year; offering this feature at no extra charge to all platform subscribers. Amazon is another service that has a subscription for high-quality music called Amazon Music HD; the latter also arrives at no extra charge for all Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers.
Hopefully Spotify wakes up soon from its nap on its laurels. After all, the demand for better quality music continues to grow day by day; and over time, users will look for those platforms that can offer it.
