Spotify's HiFi tier is coming -- but not soon
A report suggests the Apple Music lossless launch spoiled Spotify's HiFi plans, but a Spotify executive has confirmed the new tier is still coming eventually.
Spotify HiFi is coming, eventually
Spotify announced that a lossless tier called Spotify HiFi would be released in 2021. Two years later, an exec says the HiFi tier is definitely coming, but no word yet on when.
According to a report from The Verge, Spotify has had a HiFi tier available for over a year with employees able to access it. However, plans changed when Apple Music and Amazon revealed lossless music at no additional cost.
The report was generated based on an interview with Spotify co-president Gustav Soderstrom conducted by Decoder and additional information obtained by The Verge. The interview touched on the HiFi tier briefly, but no release dates or other information was provided.
"We announced it, but then the industry changed for a bunch of reasons," Soderstrom told Decoder. "We are going to do it, but we're going to do it in a way where it makes sense for us and for our listeners. The industry changed and we had to adapt."
The interviewer pressed for more details as to why the tier was delayed, but Soderstrom wouldn't specifically mention competitors or deals with labels. The report generated after states Apple Music's lossless introduction at no additional cost spoiled Spotify's plans -- though Soderstrom did not say so directly.
Allegedly, Spotify had hoped to offer lossless music at a higher paid tier and may still. This tier would be a revenue driver and could offer even more functionality, like spatial audio.
The interview covered by the report was focused on Spotify's pivot into its TikTok-like format. There was no mention of a Spotify HiFi release date or of any intention to include spatial audio or other formats.
Read on AppleInsider
Spotify HiFi is coming, eventually
Spotify announced that a lossless tier called Spotify HiFi would be released in 2021. Two years later, an exec says the HiFi tier is definitely coming, but no word yet on when.
According to a report from The Verge, Spotify has had a HiFi tier available for over a year with employees able to access it. However, plans changed when Apple Music and Amazon revealed lossless music at no additional cost.
The report was generated based on an interview with Spotify co-president Gustav Soderstrom conducted by Decoder and additional information obtained by The Verge. The interview touched on the HiFi tier briefly, but no release dates or other information was provided.
"We announced it, but then the industry changed for a bunch of reasons," Soderstrom told Decoder. "We are going to do it, but we're going to do it in a way where it makes sense for us and for our listeners. The industry changed and we had to adapt."
The interviewer pressed for more details as to why the tier was delayed, but Soderstrom wouldn't specifically mention competitors or deals with labels. The report generated after states Apple Music's lossless introduction at no additional cost spoiled Spotify's plans -- though Soderstrom did not say so directly.
Allegedly, Spotify had hoped to offer lossless music at a higher paid tier and may still. This tier would be a revenue driver and could offer even more functionality, like spatial audio.
The interview covered by the report was focused on Spotify's pivot into its TikTok-like format. There was no mention of a Spotify HiFi release date or of any intention to include spatial audio or other formats.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
spotify already offers some of the lowest payments per stream. So sure, they would want to raise their monthly fees. If the licensees require higher stream payments, they would have to. There’s no money for it otherwise. Despite having Ads for the majority of their now 500 million subscribers, they just can’t seem to “stream” a profit. How much longer will this continue?
In which bizarre universe is the logical business choice simply accepting that there is no way to make any money off streaming business model, and in consequence reducing it to a loss-leading add-on? I mean, rather than figuring that THE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL DOESN'T WORK?
I'm slightly irate over this because at NO POINT in this (mis)judgement of business viability do the interests of those supplying the actual content ever enter into the equation.
Well, now. I have this D-sub tie-line cable that would like a word with you.
The reality is it's a hard business and unless you were the Beatles, there's never really been a 'golden age' when everybody made a decent living making music. Heck, even the Beatles were screwed out of the publishing rights to most of their songwriting catalog. Streaming at least has the potential to be a far better way to pay musicians for recorded music. An artist can only (potentially) make money from a physical album the first time each unit is sold. "Potentially," because record labels pay artists an advance against which they charge the costs of pressing albums until such point their accounting departments can no longer hide the fact that sales have exceeded up-fornt costs and are generating profit. DIY artists trade the advance and smoke-and-mirror accounting for simply paying the actual up-front costs of pressing and distributing records. None of these people were making bank straight out of the gate. "First time each unit is sold," because physical media only pays once, when each unit is first sold. After that, the used market undercuts future sales. Artists make less than nothing from the sale of used copies of their records. They get no royalties from the sale, and each used copy sold could've been a new copy sale that would've paid royalties back to the artist.
So while it's shocking to look at the fraction of a penny that an artist gets paid for each play of a song on a streaming service, you can't just compare that to the couple of bucks they might eventually get from the sale of a vinyl album. That album only pays once, no matter how many times it gets played. If it goes out of print, the money stops. Streaming pays every time someone plays a track. There's very little up-front cost to getting it uploaded to the streaming services. DIY artists can skip the labels altogether and make decent-sounding recordings at home. Once it's up on the streaming service, it never goes out of print. Use of a 20 year-old song on a popular TV show can generate sudden interest and immediate income for an artist whose album has been physically out-of-print for years. Streaming services also stopped the industry-wide death-spiral of the file-sharing days. Nobody bothers with that crap when they can just find it and listen to it on Apple Music, rather than worrying whether they've remembered to back up their hard-discs full of stolen music files.
So should streaming services pay artists a higher rate? Probably, but the business model actually has the potential to be the most equitable way to pay musicians for recorded music since Thomas Edison started cutting wax cylinders.
seriously, it’s the potential customers. When ‘tidal first appeared here I had a fairly long discussion with the then CEO. I asked him what he was trying to do here. He said that young people, including college students would race to pay $20 a month got CD quality music. I told him he was nuts. I asked why he was demo’ing at a high end audio show if he believed what he said, rather than at some gathering for young people, such as a ComicCon. His answer was garbled. He really had no idea. We see what happened. When it was bought, they immediately released a compressed version for $9.95.
remember that what every streaming company is paying was negotiated. It wasn’t simply a; “This is what we’re going to pay you.” So there’s a connection between what can be paid for a company to stay in business, and what recording companies and artists want to get paid. Unfortunately, it come back to what consumers are willing to pay. Somewhere in there is where the payment per stream lies.
Next, how do I know Netflix is charging more for UHD/4K? Because that's what they did, and I can remember things from before last week.
Their UI was terrible. At the start, they had some Atmos-featuring song playlists, and they had a "new Atmos releases" list of albums. You could not search for Atmos-enabled content. If an album did have Atmos-formated content, the same album would also be available in a compressed stereo format, and possibly a lossless stereo format. You couldn't tell which was which until you clicked on the album, so you'd have to play a shell game to find the one you wanted. The list of "new" Atmos releases was limited to 30 albums, so adding a new album meant an old one dropped off of the list. Since you couldn't search specifically for Atmos content, if you hadn't noted down or saved things that were in that list before, good luck finding them again later. Luckily, this entire approach meant there wasn't enough consumer interest generated for the format to cause anyone to go out of their way to create new Atmos mixes, so the "new" Atmos album list stayed pretty static most of the time. It also meant I'd listened at least once to the things I wanted to hear in Atmos fairly quickly, and they weren't adding new material at a rate that warranted the expense of an extra music subscription. Their UI was so bad I definitely wasn't going to replace Apple Music with Tidal.
I even sent an inquiry to their customer support, and received a reply that they'd share my idea with their engineers for being able to search for or otherwise easily browse to find Dolby Atmos content, but they didn't think there were any plans to do anything like that. This was for a feature that they were paying to heavily advertise, and that they were charging a premium to access. So I did used free trial, probably paid for a month, then dropped it in hopes that Apple would do something better. Apple did something better.
It's no surprise that their CEO had no idea who his prospective audience was. The pricing meant he should've been courting audiophiles, but the user interface meant he was really chasing people who don't care what they're listening to. The ambivalent audience isn't going to pay the premium, and the audiophile audience isn't going to pay to dig through a figurative Walmart bin of crap titles, hoping to randomly find content they actually want.
I'm not arguing (nor under the illusion) that everybody should be able to make a decent living making music.
I'm arguing against the devaluing of music.
Back in the Beatles' day, records were expensive. Most people, if they had records at all, had maybe two or three albums, and many didn't even have record player on which to play them (they'd take them to parties to play them there).
Music was worth a lot, and those who weren't content just listening to radio or going to clubs chose carefully and bought what was important to them.
Paying the equivalent of two Starbucks Matcha Latte for EVERYTHING THERE IS means that music ain't worth shit — which simply isn't true, considering how it can make people feel.
This needs to change, IMO, and it can. IIRC, people today are paying LESS monthly for their music subscription, than they used to in the days of CDs, on average.
So they're getting infinitely more, while actually paying less than they used to. How can this be? It's certainly not the record labels eating the difference.
Which brings us to cost of production. Yes, it's possible to make great records with only a MacBook and maybe a microphone, these days, rather than needing a room which cost half a million in 1974 dollars to build. But conversely, that also means that there's so much more out there, that it's impossible to stand out and actually get plays without investing thousands into promotion.
(The argument that a studio in a box can be had for $3000 these days, rather than paying $600/day also assumes that the months' or years' work it takes to create is free — and that all music can be created in-the-box, which is a whole 'nother Book of Misconceptions…)
Which means that, given the business scheme of streaming, is impossible to recoup your costs even if you're moderately successful.
A HUGE part of this problem is that the payout scheme works by assuming that music is a commodity, rather than something people care about.
The way it works right now is that all the subscription fees are pooled, costs subtracted, and the rest is paid out by the absolute number of streams.
But that lumps the person who just keeps a Charts Radio stream running twelve hours a day in with the guy who's a total fan of this obscure underground band from the other side of the world and only listens to his six favourite records whenever he gets a chance to.
That guy's money still goes to Drake and Taylor Swift.
All respect to Drake and Swift; they deserve their accolades, and they certainly deserve to be rich, BUT: They don't deserve this guy's subscription money.
The payout model MUST be adjusted to account for what a subscriber is actually listening to. The way it is now, there is zero value attached to how individual people value the music they listen to.
Of course, that means that EVERY SINGLE LABEL DEAL must be renegotiated. And that's not going to happen for a long time.
I can't help but wish that Jobs had been around to negotiate the basic deals at the dawn of the streaming era — but he was (rightly) a staunch opponent of the rental model, plus the record industry wasn't going to let him negotiate a fair deal a second time.
AND NOW: enter Dolby Atmos. You've got music valued at NOTHING, with no hope of ever recouping investment unless you're a major star, and there's this industry fad that requires investing in expensive, acoustically treated rooms (high five-figure investment) PLUS a studio-grade 7.1 system and the appropriate controllers and software.