Spotify HiFi should reach subscribers this year as a new level of payment regardless of the normal subscription that is already paid
Spotify will soon begin to offer uncompressed music with the same quality as a CD, a service that it has dubbed Spotify HiFi and that will have a price higher than the current 10 euros that the normal subscription costs, although at the moment it has not specified how much they will have to pay for it its users. The service will only be available initially in a limited number of countries.
Typically, to make streaming possible and save bandwidth costs, music on services like Spotify or Apple Music travels in a compressed format. It also does so in audio formats that remove some of the information from the original file to further reduce the space they occupy.
This loss is not worrisome because the final quality is still good enough for most listeners. Many of us would have trouble correctly identifying when a song is streaming on Spotify or probing from a high-quality local file, especially if we listen to it, for example, while walking down the street with mid-range headphones.
But for music lovers who also have a good ear, these formats may be insufficient. Some instruments, such as guitars or the voices themselves, sound distorted if the compression is too high.
The alternative is to use loseless formats, which also compress the original audio, although not as much, and which do so with techniques that do not eliminate information in the compression, transmission and subsequent decompression process.
These formats were not practical until recently due to the greater consumption of bandwidth, but in recent years several services, such as Amazon Music HD or Tidal, have begun to offer them. They are generally more expensive than a subscription to Spotify (Tidal costs 20 euros a month, for example, and Amazon Music HD 15 euros a month), in part because the price that these companies have to pay for copyrights is also higher. .
MORE PODCASTS
In addition to Spotify HiFi, the company has also announced new initiatives in podcasts, one of the business areas in which it is investing the most and which is growing strongly. The company already has more than two million Podcasts in its catalog and will maintain its commitment to its own content, relying on well-known voices. Soon, for example, it will launch a podcast hosted by singer Bruce Springsteen and former US President Barack Obama.
Thanks to a deal with WordPress, Spotify will also allow to transform articles published on a blog into podcast chapters and will add tools to make podcasts more participatory, allowing listeners to express their opinion in surveys or ask questions of the program’s hosts.
Finally, it will begin to offer advertisers the ability to include ads in some of the podcasts in its catalog. At first it will be for exclusive or original Spotify podcasts, but with time it will also be opened to third-party programs.
