If you think the current generation of college students, and millennials are going to open their wallets in the next 5 years for $3,000 cables and $20,000 speakers - you’re fooling yourself. The audiophile community is definitely growing, but that growth comes from those getting into vintage audio, used high-end components and entry-level systems below $5,000. The future of high-end audio is not going to take that quantum leap from an iPhone and Apple AirPods to a $30,000 stereo anytime soon. Of that total – less than 20% are high-res versions of those albums. One of the best things about Roon which is another part of this conversation, is that I can see exactly how many albums I have on my list - and how many are high-res versions.Īs of today, I have 3,491 albums saved across both platforms. I’ve had a Tidal account for almost 5 years and Qobuz account for slightly under 2 years of time. Math is hard for some people but let’s take a look at the numbers. If Spotify are really serious about “better” audio quality then why didn’t they announce a high-res tier to put Tidal and Qobuz out of business? How many people watched the Billie Eilish video and ran to their local audio/video store and spent money? Or certainly not as quickly as some may like. I’m not sure that it’s going to happen like that. Why would it? Build it and they will come? Have Bluesound or Sonos seen a surge in sales since the announcement? One thing is for sure: the music streaming wars are heating up further with Spotify offering its own high-quality streaming tier, so it probably won’t be much longer before we hear Apple announcing something similar.But what’s not being highlighted enough in all of this exuberance over record sales and Spotify offering a lossless tier - is that streaming represents 83% of the market and that there is no empirical evidence (or actual sales data) that Spotify HiFi is going to move the needle at all for mainstream consumers when it comes to better quality audio. In short, there are a lot of things we don’t know about Spotify HiFi at the moment, so we’ll have to wait until the company shares more later this year. Amazon’s high-quality offering runs $14.99 while TIDAL’s is priced at $19.99, so we can probably expect Spotify HiFi to fall somewhere within that range.
Still, even if Spotify was dragging its heels on rolling out a high-quality option, it seems to be beating Apple to the punch here, giving it a leg up on one of its biggest competitors.Īt the moment, we don’t know how much Spotify Connect is going to cost, and that’s going to be an important thing for a lot of subscribers. Spotify says that high quality music streaming is something that’s been consistently requested by users, which makes one wonder why it’s taken Spotify so long to roll out such an option. The company does say that its HiFi streaming tier will offer music in a “CD-quality, lossless audio format.” It’s launching as part of Spotify Connect, so Spotify HiFi songs will be able to play on speakers that support Spotify Connect.
Spotify HiFi will at first be available to “Spotify Premium subscribers in select markets,” but unfortunately for us, Spotify doesn’t get more specific than that.