Spotify is rumored to be preparing a rollout of a new $20-a-month tier known as “Supremium,” which will allow listeners to enjoy higher-quality music, playlist mixing tools, and access to audio books.
Tech sites were abuzz after Chris Messina, the famous blogger who is credited with inventing the hashtag, authored a post on Threads that included what appeared to be the logo for Spotify’s new service.
According to Messina, the “Supremium” tier will include a “sound capsule” personalized to each user as well as “24-bit lossless audio” — also known as “high fidelity” or “HiFi.”
Users who subscribe to the more expensive tier will also reportedly have the option of listening to 30 hours of audio books per month as well as the ability to sort one’s library by mood, activity, and genre.
“Lossless” is considered to be audio in its purest form.
It is higher quality than the songs that are generally streamed on Spotify and other services due to the need to compress the files so that they do not require excessive data usage.
Spotify, which initially planned to introduce “HiFi” audio in February 2021, reportedly delayed the rollout of lossless audio after competitors such as Apple Music and Amazon Music began offering the service at no extra charge.
Spotify charges listeners $9.99 a month for its premium tier while Apple and Amazon boosted the prices of their standard tiers to $10.99 a month.
“At Spotify, we are constantly iterating and ideating to improve our product offering and offer value to users,” a spokesperson for Spotify told The Post.
“But we don’t comment on speculation around possible new features and do not have anything new to share at this time.”
Earlier this year, it was reported that Spotify was looking to introduce a more expensive tier in order to generate revenue and placate investors who have encouraged management to raise prices.
The tech site The Verge posted a screenshot of code within Spotify’s app. The code first appeared on a Reddit account.
In late July, Spotify said that its second quarter revenues came in below estimates despite the fact that it beat analyst expectations for both monthly active users and subscribers.
After laying out plans last year to get 1 billion users by 2030 and to reach $100 billion of revenue annually, Spotify has been growing rapidly, but its costly expansion into podcasts and audio books has hit margins.
The number of monthly active users rose to 551 million in the second quarter, beating Spotify’s guidance and analysts’ forecast of 526.8 million.
Premium subscribers, who account for most of the company’s revenue, rose 17% to 220 million, topping estimates of 216.6 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
However, quarterly revenue was $3.51 billion, below analysts’ estimate of $3.53 billion. That was in line with Spotify’s own estimates.
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