Spotify Confirms Upcoming ‘Deluxe’ Subscription, But It’s Not Coming Soon
Spotify has confirmed that it is working on a “deluxe” version of its subscription service that will offer high fidelity audio streaming, but the company is still in the “early days” of the planning, CEO Daniel Ek said during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday. When this plan does launch, it is speculated that it will be significantly more expensive than the current Premium plan. The Swedish audio streaming service first announced that it would introduce a high-end subscription service called Spotify HiFi in 2020.
Spotify’s “Deluxe” Subscription
During the income call, Spotify’s CEO revealed that a new subscription plan is in development, which would sit above the Premium plan. “The plan here is to offer a much better version of Spotify,” the official said. However, the official did not go into details about the timeline of the rollout.
According to the CEO, this new subscription would be a “deluxe” version of Spotify, with high-fidelity audio and other perks, in addition to the existing features of Spotify Premium. While he remained cryptic about other offerings in this plan, previous reports have speculated that the streaming service could bundle a feature that would allow users to generate playlists using artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools.
According to Spotify’s CEO, the subscription won’t be cheap. He said that the deluxe subscription could cost at least $5 (roughly Rs. 419) more per month than Spotify Premium, which costs $11.99 (roughly Rs. 1,000) for the Premium Individual subscription.
“Think about something like $5 above the current premium tier. So it’s probably around the $17 or $18 price point, but kind of a premium version of Spotify that has all the benefits that the regular Spotify version has, but a lot more control, a lot higher quality across the board and some other things that I’m not ready to talk about yet,” Ek said during the earnings call.
Notably, Spotify’s competitors, such as Amazon Music and Apple Music, offer lossless audio streaming at no additional cost. However, both platforms are only available via a paid subscription and do not have the ad-supported free plan that Spotify does offer, albeit with certain limitations.
The CEO went on to reveal that a “good subset” of the streaming service’s overall user base wants a “much better” version of Spotify. The new subscription plan would address this area, offering more control than just high-res audio streaming.
