Spotify's HiFi tier could finally be about to launch

i agree with Christianb5s4 - 

Spotify is great for UI, playlist creation, playlist sharing, content, and recommendations. I also have been using Qobuz but prefer ease of use with Spotify. I like the 2-stage random play setting which I don't see on Qobuz.

Now if only Spotify comes thru on a lossless level, I can also enjoy that on my 2-channel main audio setup

This thread was started two years ago and the discussions about Spotify high rez go back at least a decade.  Does anyone know why it took them so long?

Does anyone know why it took them so long?

I think it was the licensing issue with the content providers. Maybe that is the reason we saw some recent price hikes?

Did Spotify have different issues than Tidal, Qobuz, Apple and Amazon, all of whom offer higher resolution than what Spotify had been offering?

@mahler123 nothing official from what I’ve read but there were rumors that track with milpai’s comments. I posted the following way back in 2021:

Still waiting for Spotify, but saw the following from Reddit. Whether this is true, who knows, but I'll continue to be hopeful...

Important to note that changing the quality of the music at any price point changes their deals with international publishing rights organizations and labels. This is a VERY long and intensive process (it’s what I do for a living at another smaller DSP) and while I was really hoping for HiFi this year, my best guess is that Apple / Tidal / Amazon’s new models really messed with the deals that they had in place in the sense that they no longer made financial sense. Likely that they had to go back and renegotiate all the deals based on whatever subscription fees they opted to change with regard to lossless since it affects their royalty payments.

That being said, I think I have mentioned this before, I have SEEN Spotify HiFi in actual operation. Employees at the company have it enabled in beta and have for a long time. Which lends more to my theory that it’s not a technology / product issue and more of a finance / publishing issue.