Spatial Audio, which can be experienced on either headphones or a full home theater speaker system, continues to impress us with its sound quality and is one of the more exciting advancements to come to music listening in decades. (It’s unclear if the higher-quality tier would be priced significantly more than the company’s current Premium offering.)Īpple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited also both provide tracks and full albums in Spatial Audio – essentially Dolby Atmos for music – and so does Tidal, another music service that delivers lossless streams, and does so at a $9.99 / £9.99 per month cost. The company had announced plans for a Spotify HiFi tier with lossless high-resolution audio, but that was back in 2021 and we’re still waiting on it. For their $10.99 / £10.99 per month cost, both Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited offer lossless and high-res audio, while Spotify continues to stream using a lossy compression format that reduces sound quality. Compared to Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited, Spotify was already a bad value. After all, Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited are now both more expensive, and the cost of everything is going up from eggs to airline tickets. Streaming prices are going up for all manner of services, and a price hike for Spotify is something that can be easily swallowed by music listeners who have long used and depended on it. CEO Daniel Ek commented in the company’s layoff announcement that “in 2022, the growth of Spotify’s operating expenses outpaced our revenue growth by two times,” and that the situation was “unsustainable long-term in any climate.” Spotify is clearly in hot water, and Ek’s statements seem to indicate that costs for the service, which has maintained a stable $9.99 / £9.99 individual pricing plan since its early days, will soon be going up as the company scrambles to cope with rising expenses and falling revenues.Īs reported by Variety, Spotify’s CEO had said previously in an October 2022 earnings call that a price increase “is one of the things we would like to do and it’s something we will with our label partners.” Analysis: A more expensive Spotify will be a hard sell

Spotify hifi price