Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has confirmed that a ‘deluxe’ version of the music streaming platform with high-resolution audio will be coming soon.

Ek, who co-founded Spotify in 2006, declared during Spotify’s earnings call yesterday (23 July) that the new version is on its way, though didn’t give an exact time frame. He said, “The plan here is to offer a much better version of Spotify. Think something like $5 above the current premium tier.

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“So it’s probably around a $17 or $18 price point, but sort of 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.”

Spotify first announced its HiFi lossless streaming feature in 2021, and three years later it has yet to appear. It’s been suggested recently that it could come with perks like AI-powered playlists, headphone sound quality optimisation, and advanced library management as an add-on to the platform’s pre-existing premium subscription, but they could all form part of a deluxe version instead.

It’s been thought that Spotify was taken by surprise when rivals Apple and Amazon started to include higher-resolution audio in their standard subscription plans, so it’s taken some time for them to come up with a deluxe plan that they think customers will find worth paying for.

Ek said, “There’s a good subset of that group of 246 million subscribers that want a much better version of Spotify. Those are huge music lovers who are primarily looking for even more flexibility in how they use Spotify and the music capabilities that exist on Spotify.”

According to Bloomberg, Spotify hopes to release the deluxe version later this year, so we might learn a lot more about it in the coming months.

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