Score this name, Supreme, because it is possible that it ends up being the name of the expected HiFi quality Spotify plan. Now, I’m also telling you that, taking into account the background, it’s best not to get your hopes up too much (if you’re one of the people who are still waiting for it, of course), because it may take a long time, and even it is possible that it will end up stored again in the same drawer in which it has been for two years now.
We better start doing a little memory. It was February 2021, little by little we were recovering traces of the old normality, we were still recovering from the impact that Filomena caused (with the coming heat, surely more than one will miss her) and Spotify finally confirmed their plans to launch a new level of subscription to the service in which the music would have HiFi quality. It was not something new, actually the rumors about this improvement had already been present for years, and even the company itself advanced something back in 2017. Thus, it was the confirmation of something highly expected.
We all expected Spotify’s HiFi plan to be more expensive than the normal one, but then Apple arrived, which updated the Apple Music catalog to HiFi quality without increasing the price. Amazon responded immediately, removing Prime Music’s standard plan, which was replaced by its HiFi mode, priced as standard. Here Spotify’s plans went awry, since it was already much more difficult to charge more than its adversaries. And it still had Tidal, but this service also made that same leap at the end of the same year.
Thus, the plans were relegated, giving rise to moments as grotesque as the interview with Gustav Söderström, co-president of the company last March. And perhaps thanks to pressure measures like that, it seems that the doyen of streaming music has put the batteries. Thus, as we can read in Bloomberg, Spotify could launch Supremium, which is the name of its HiFi-quality subscription, sometime in 2023. It is not specified in which markets it will debut, but it will be outside the United States in its first phase.
This leak also points to the Supremium subscription level (which is the internal name for now) will be priced higher than the standard subscription, a rather bold position considering that its main competitors offer HiFi in their standard plans. And, to compensate subscribers of the current premium modality (the one at 9.99 euros/month, which would maintain that price and would not have access to the HiFi catalog), Spotify plans to offer several hours of audiobooks. There are no clues, at the moment, about the price that the Supreme level would have.
Definitely, Spotify is late (if it does arrive, I repeat that I won’t believe it until I see it, they already sneaked it into me once), and if it also does so at a higher price than its competitors, who have already consolidated HiFi quality as the market standard, it seems difficult that this model can work. Only a proposal that is capable of standing out from its competition, in any way, could prevent this modality from being born condemned to death.
