Spotify, the most popular music streaming service in the world, serving over 100 million tracks to 240 million monthly active users, does not have a high-resolution (“lossless”) audio option. That lack is an unusual lag for a dominant consumer service which leads the industry with many other consumer innovations. At least two competing services — Tidal and Amazon Music Unlimited — have offered high-resolution audio for years.
The missing piece could be plugged in soon at Spotify … well, sometime in 2025 at least. We already knew from the company’s Q3 earnings report that lossless audio was somewhere on the product roadmap. And we learned the subscription name: Super Premium, which might contain other subscriber benefits in addition to the awaited lossless audio.
Earlier this week another hopeful indicator surfaced: Boyd Muir, Chief Operating Officer of Universal Music Group (UMG, the world’s largest label conglomerate), predicted a wide release of lossless audio alternatives in Spotify and, more generally, across most streamers, in 2025. Muir made a companion prediction: 20 to 30 percent of users will opt for premium service. (Muir made these comments at Morgan Stanley’s European Tech, Media and Telecom Conference in Barcelona.)
In addition to lossless audio, Muir predicted other premium features like artist/fan chat rooms; we have long puzzled over why Spotify has not experimented more with social features.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has made his own forecasts about premium service. In the Q2 earnings report he described “a deluxe version of Spotify that has all of the benefits that the normal 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 just yet.”