Spotify Plans New Premium Tier, Expected To Include HiFi Audio (bloomberg.com) 50
Spotify is planning a more expensive subscription option that's expected to include high-fidelity audio in an effort to drive more revenue and placate investors who've been saying the company should raise its prices. From a report: Dubbed "Supremium" internally, according to people familiar with the strategy, the new tier will be Spotify's most expensive plan and likely offer a HiFi feature the company first announced it was working on in 2021. Spotify delayed that product's rollout after two of its competitors, Apple Music and Amazon Music, began offering the feature for free as part of their standard plans. The new tier will launch this year in non-US markets first.
To augment its current "Premium" tier, Spotify will give subscribers expanded access to audiobooks, either through a specific number of hours free per month or a specific number of titles. There will be an option to purchase more. Currently, the company only sells audiobooks a la carte through its app. Spotify plans to introduce that feature in the US in October, after first launching in markets abroad.
To augment its current "Premium" tier, Spotify will give subscribers expanded access to audiobooks, either through a specific number of hours free per month or a specific number of titles. There will be an option to purchase more. Currently, the company only sells audiobooks a la carte through its app. Spotify plans to introduce that feature in the US in October, after first launching in markets abroad.
Do not stream music. (Score:2, Funny)
Buy the 8-track tape and digitize it from your hi-fi to your Gateway computer so the artist can get paid.
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Re: Do not stream music. (Score:2)
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I believe that it's actually referring to lossless data (as opposed to dynamic range) compression.
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Objective. Using some lossless algorithm like FLAC.
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Are they sending zipped wave files?
You can't be serious. Do you not realise there's lossless audio compression algorithms? Do people zip bitmaps and send them to you as well because you don't understand TIF exists?
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It's not bad, unless one is a pompous dick with dozens of $K worth of audio equipment, in which case why use Spotify at all?
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Appreciate the non-aggressive response.
I plan to buy several thousands dollars worth of audio equipment in the near future, knowing very well that my hearing won't rise to its output quality. That makes me a pompous dick as well, I guess. However, I will not complain about Spotify "low quality" songs. As a matter of fact, I plan to use my own (lossy as well as lossless) library, and reserve Spotify for phone, desktop and Bluetooth speakers I use sometimes, e.g. when working in the courtyard or my workshop.
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That's how I do it.
Spotify is for my car...gym, riding my bike, and my computer desk speakers....places that are less than optimum listening environments.
But when I want to listen in higher fidelity, on the system I've been building sinc
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I find spotify to be just great for the worst musical listening environments...the car, when out on a bike ride (earbuds), and at my desk with decent speakers.
My hearing is a bit shot at my age and few too many lou
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They target non-technical music lovers who don't want to deal with ripping CDs or setting up a file server for the downloaded content. It's understandable in particular for younger generation who did not have the opportunity to accumulate downloaded or ripped files along the past 4 decades of the CD-quality world, and think of music, or movies, as a natively streaming thing. The use case is not limited to pompous people. A quick search on internet shows that many home audio systems offer High Resolution in
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unless one is a pompous dick with dozens of $K worth of audio equipment, in which case why use Spotify at all?
Being a pompous dick aside why would you not use Spotify if you spend lots of money on audio equipment? I mean the point after all is listening to music and Spotify has the biggest library.
Okay sure there are many audiophiles out there who think the point is to masturbate to the glow of a tube amplifier, but I like the old adage: "If your hifi is worth more than your music collection you've missed the point."
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You have a point there.
What I meant was, past a certain quality threshold, the quality difference becomes largely academic. Maybe top 5% of people with excellent hearing could detect it. There have been studies on that.
I did some blind tests myself, using MP3 @ 256 Kbit vs FLAC vs original CD, and I couldn't tell which was which. I could, however, correctly differentiate between MP3 @ 128 Kbit and FLAC most of the time, and differentiate between MP3 @ 64 Kbit and FLAC all the time.
I am listening to Spotify
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Yeah absolutely. To be clear hearing things is a learned skill not capability of the ear. I can pass ABX tests with MP3s @ 320kbps, but not AAC or any other codec that is actually used. But it took me forever to learn what to listen for***. One needs to remember MP3 is old enough to own a house and nearly have teenage kids by this point. I can't beat a 256kbps AAC which is what Spotify premium currently uses. Mind you I've not come across people who can yet at all. There's a simple ABX test you can send peo
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One needs to remember MP3 is old enough to own a house and nearly have teenage kids by this point.
So is part of my music library.
I have MP3s from the late 90s, and during a house move in early 2000s I lost about 2K original CDs (mover said the boxes got lost, I knew they stole it but couldn't prove it). So... sadly, no re-ripping, and I doubt 30 year old CDs would work well enough for that anyway.
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Spotify's audio quality isn't bad at all. I would say its actually very good when compared to other formats.
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That's the thing Spotify is 256kbps AAC for subscribers or 128kbps AAC for the free tier. Audiophiles talk a big game so I often just paste this link to them https://abx.digitalfeed.net/sp... [digitalfeed.net] and ask them to prove they can tell a difference.
I usually get back a list of angry excuses for their own ineptitude.
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That's the thing Spotify is 256kbps AAC for subscribers or 128kbps AAC for the free tier. Audiophiles talk a big game so I often just paste this link to them https://abx.digitalfeed.net/sp... [digitalfeed.net] and ask them to prove they can tell a difference.
I usually get back a list of angry excuses for their own ineptitude.
You can tell subtle differences in AAC up to about 160 kbps; after that, not so much.
But definitely not in a car.
hi fi (Score:2)
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Do people really attach hi fidelity stereo systems to devices that run spotify? Can the sound hardware in these devices actually rise to the sound quality of hi fi? There are a lot of places the quality can bottleneck.
I guess if you only search hard enough on the Web, you will find a vendor for plastic audiophile Bluetooth speakers with 5cm chassis that advertises the 9000,-$ product by telling you how the fixed built-in Lithium battery is connected to the PCB using only the finest oxygen-free pure silver cables. I mean, back in the 1980s people might still have known what a decent bass speaker sounds like, but a choice of irrational hardware components was also for sale back then...
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Do people really attach hi fidelity stereo systems to devices that run spotify?
My $15000 studio monitors support Spotify Connect. So yes. Yes they do. Virtually every component audio streamer on the market will support a range of systems including Spotify. If buying active speakers isn't your thing maybe you want to get a Rose RS150B Network streamer in your system for the low price of $4995. Bonus points if you spend more money on a high end DAC rendering that $4599 investment into only a box that runs a bit of software.
Can the sound hardware in these devices actually rise to the sound quality of hi fi?
Why not? How far must a head be up ones arse to think that a bit
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Yes! Audio has come insanely far in the past 15 years -- today, for under $100, you can get a line-out that is objectively measured to exceed the limits and accuracy that human hearing can perceive.
You can have hi-fi audio cheap and easy with headphones, and it's not too expensive with speakers either.
I used to have a giant collection of FLAC, but Spotify's current bitrates on the Premium tear are transparent to mine and 99% of peoples ears. Lossless is a waste of money and people shouldn't be paying for it
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What about Joe Rogan ? (Score:1)
I thought he was bringing bazillion of dollars.
They should file a few more mentally deranged people on their lists of "talk shows". MyPillow guy will love it.
To sell it, they'll degrade the quality for others (Score:3)
Watch for the "regular" subscription tier to have degraded quality, so you'll have a reason to want to pay more for the upgrade.
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Not really. Audiophiles will buy anything regardless of the fact that most of them couldn't identify an shitty MP3 from any super high res file to save themselves.
Shit you can just tell people you're streaming high res without changing the quality and they'll still buy it.
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They'll just do what the radio stations do and compress the living shit out of it so that high-volume sounds like assholes and low-volume sounds like slightly less distorted assholes.
Ads (Score:3)
How about getting rid of ads on podcasts? Having to listen to ads despite paying for their existing "premium" service is maddening.
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Don't use Spotify for podcasts.
Throw the creator money directly in Patreon and get access to their ad-free RSS feed.
Most of the podcasts that I listen to these days are ad-free using this method.
Prepare... (Score:4, Funny)
Watch out for nano harmonics that might muddy the bass and introduce digital sibilance.
Only use 4-pin balanced XLR connectors with oxygen free silver cabling.
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Dollar Late and Dollar Short (Score:2)
Nice to see they're catching up to Apple Music, which has offered hifi audio for several years and charges nothing extra for it.
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In defence of Spotify Apple fucked them over royally by flexing their massive muscles. Spotify announced this first (at least first of the mainstream music providers rather than those targeting specifically audiophiles like Tidal and Qobuz who have always offered it). It was only when Spotify was already in negotiations for the content and it was clear they would charge extra for it that Apple and Amazon jumped in quickly to undercut them.
But congrats on praising abusive market practices, while also defendi
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LULz, Spotify pays artist the very least of any streaming provider. So keep praising their abusive market practices. Apple and Amazon didn't screw Spotify. Spotify is just greedy.
"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."
In other words, "We have to find a way to make a bunch of money on it and them offer
Think you can tell the difference Hi-Fi (Score:2)
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I definitely cannot unless it is 128bit MP3 or lower. Above that, I really can't tell. Even 128bit is "listenable" for me. Just like watching old TV shows with their shitty (relative) quality is fine.
Fuck American Capitalism (Score:2)
an effort to drive more revenue and placate investors who've been saying the company should raise its prices
The duty to constantly raise returns for investors is a fucking cancer on business and capitalism. Every company I can think of that has failed or been told to fuck off and die by consumers came to that point after either a massive social blunder, or because investors and C-suite asshats got way too greedy and drove off all their users.
I like Spotify, and I use it normally, but if they remove features or make me pay more for the same service they're going to get fucking dropped the same way Pandora did
I want to compensate artists fairly. (Score:1)
I am still trying to figure out if they are doing this effectively.