Pfft. If Spotify wants me to up the subscription they should give me the ability to directly download songs.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
According to references discovered in the Spotify app’s code by Chris Messina, the Superpremium service now has a flashy logo and a longer list of features beyond the 24-bit lossless audio we’ve been anticipating.
In fact, the broader feature set appears to be set to include the recently discovered AI playlist generation tools, advanced mixing tools, additional hours of audiobook listening and a personalized offering called “Your Sound Capsule.”
A couple of weeks ago, Reddit user Hypixely noted that the new, more expensive tier would be priced at $19.99 per month, citing screenshots of Spotify’s code, and would include AI playlists and lossless audio.
The latter is no longer referenced as “HiFi,” the premium service Spotify introduced years ago but then failed to launch.
Questioned on the delay in Spotify’s Q2 earnings, CEO Daniel Ek said, “What I will say of course, is that Hi-Fi remains something that we think has value, but it’s something that has value to probably more aficionados in the streaming market and we’re interested in, obviously, how we could use that as one tool to, in the future, increase our value even further, but we don’t have anything to announce at this point.” Reading between the lines, it sounds like he could be suggesting using HiFi as one way to raise prices in the future, but that the service had been retooled to reach a broader audience.
Meanwhile, the Reddit user had also uncovered a Superpremium feature called Soundcheck that tells you about your listening habits and lets you discover what mix of sounds is “uniquely yours.” However, Messina is seeing this feature now labeled as “Your Sound Capsule.” He suspects it could be related to Spotify’s “playlist in a bottle” — a musical time capsule experience launched earlier this year.
Saved 43% of original text.
deleted by creator
All the subscription services going up in price constantly. This bullshit is hard to abide.
Hasn’t Pandora had “AI playlists” for like 15 years?
deleted by creator
Pandora’s entire reason for being was essentially a ML (/AI) exercise to fingerprint and associate music. It’s still pretty brilliant, really.
I’ve been a paying subscriber since 2007 and it’s given me so much new music I’d never have heard of without it.
Oddly enough, regardless of the station, it’ll play me some Johnny Cash. Metal station? Johnny Cash. Punk station? Johnny Cash. Funk station? Believe it or not, Johnny Cash. I have the best Pandora in the world thanks to Johnny Cash.
Their AI DJ feature keeps touting music I might love from my high school days, then playing country music, for some reason. No, I don’t like country music. Also Spotify didn’t even exist until I was like 28 years old.
Wow if there’s one thing I really want to pay extra for is to have a computer randomly pick my music based off what I like. That’s way better than what Spotify has already been doing: randomly picking music based off what I like! True innovation. Will the service also come with some sort of slider or bar that I can use to change how loud or quiet a song is? Maybe some other buttons that can let me skip or go back to a song, even pause and play it to my liking?
They don’t think these features are compelling. The purpose of this is to create a new pricing tier so that later they can make it the (not-actually) ad-free tier and make the current (not-actually) ad-free tier have (more) ads.
The AI Dj was promising, but broken.
Would be cool to tell Spotify “make an angry Playlist I would have like in 2012” or “play music from fantasy films” or whatever. But worth that much more per month? Hmm
It needs an option to turn off the commentary. I can’t stand it.
Isn’t the inane commentary the only thing that distinguishes the AI DJ from the other playlists Spotify generates each day?
Sounds like absolute garbage.
Since Spotify can’t even make a shuffle that works, I don’t see how AI playlists would be any good either.
I’ll steal that too greedy bitches.
deleted by creator
Can I just get one without ads? That’s what I’ve been paying for and now suddenly podcasts have ads.
Are they ads spotify put there, or specific sponsors for the podcast as part of the base audio?
You pay for no ads through Spotify, but a podcast is sponsored they place ads in their cast unrelated to Spotify. I know how shitty that sounds and is, but it’s probably the only way those pods are making money.
Spotify does actually push me ads for random podcasts or album releases a couple times a month. I know that isn’t what the original commenter was talking about, but it would be nice if they could knock that shit off.
Spotify has bought out some podcasts and injected their own ads into them. You can tell which ones these are because the “now playing” bar switches from the podcast to the title of the ad. I find I’m unable to skip these in my car with my infotainment controls too which has lead to me unsubscribing from some of them.
Nope. Spotify recently started adding adds before my podcasts. So now I have to sit through three ads before the podcasts starts and the I have to sit through the ads the podcasts add. It’s unbearable.
A little bit of searching and I found this…Spotify Premium reserves the right to insert ads on exclusive podcasts, and ones that they produce/own. Ads will never be inserted into music streaming.
My best guess would be that since they allow ads for podcasts, they are throwing in Spotify pushed ads on podcasts they own. Do you happen to know if it’s specific podcasts? I would probably unsubcribe if I was randomly getting ads. The only other thing I found was people still getting ads when they were using air play, but that was a desync bug.
Those ads are in the podcasts themselves, not added by Spotify.
I’ve been listening to podcasts through Spotify for a while now, and they’re definitely inserted by Spotify from my experience. I’ve had personalized ads show up during defined ad break times, or the ad starts rolling mid sentence/doesn’t roll when they say it’s ad time.
I’m not referring to those ads. These are ads spotify adds before those ads. It’s a recent thing they started doing.
So they’re using our data and also getting paid for it 😄 I want to ditch it but can’t find an alternative that simple and with wide library.
I’ve had a Spotify sub for 10+ years. I’m getting really close to ditching it because imo the app design is getting worse as prices increase… I was super disappointed in the car thing too. Spotube is a really nice alternative that’s foss. Checkout https://spotube.netlify.app/.
Yesss, it’s UX was the main selling point it had over competitors and why I also kept with it. It has slowly started going down hill with all these library and playlist changes they have seemingly made for no reason at all, while they keep ignoring user requested features. Will check out this spotube.
Every ui update makes the app significantly worse
I’ve been using Apple Music for a couple years now and I’m pretty satisfied with it. I moved because Spotify pays artists atrociously and Apple is at least a little better. There hasn’t been much I haven’t been able to find, since there are a lot of services out there that will handle the release of music to multiple platforms easily.
I went from flac hoarding to Apple Music because they have lossless by default, and I love it. I still hoard flacs, but now when I’m not at home I have most all of the songs I love, lossless.
So they’re using our data and also getting paid for it
Yeah? Isn’t that the point of paying for a music service? I pay, they give me access to music and curate it in a way that would be enjoyable to me. How could they do that without some information about me? This is a prime example of what a company should use your data for.
This logic is really sending me, man.
Tidal has better sound quality and works just as well
OK, didn’t say it was. Just said the sound quality was better than Spotify
With Spotify going lossless, I don’t see how Tidal’s sound quality can be “better”.
Unless if you’re referring to Spotify’s current sound quality—in which case you’re making a meaningless comparison.
My comment was in the present tense. I thought that much was self-explanatory.
Tidal offers their “lossless” audio at their lowest tier, for Spotify it’ll cost $20/month. The article we’re all here commenting on mentions how Spotify previously announced and then failed to launch their Hifi service.
Suffice it to say I don’t think this is as clear cut of a case as you’re making it out to be
Deezer is decent.
You mean deezent?
YouTube with an ad block/an api. It has every song and album on it, you can make playlists and there’s a million playlists already on it.
Not lossless, so it’s not comparable.
Then buy the music and use a media player.
Less convenient and you lose music discovery. Also not comparable.
Tidal’s pretty good, they cost the same as spotify but all accounts have access to lossless. The playlists it makes for me are no worse than spotify’s and I can sleep happy knowing the artists I listen to get compensated better than on either Spotify or Apple Music.
I also feel the app’s design helps me see music in the context of the album it was released in instead of as random tracks, which has made me reconnect with some kinds of music I’d grown apart from after I got Spotify.
Tidal’s base subscription costs the same as spotify, but to get lossless you have to pay more. Where I live it’s 20 euros / month for lossless.
I decided to give it a try.
An ‘invalid’ character in a password, that’s just great.
Why not use youtube music via a foss client ? Or just use spottube.
InnerTune is what finally got me to ditch Spotify. It’s free, no account required, uses YouTube Music (so imo, a wider range of content) AND shuffle is genuinely random.
Finally, lossless audio.
Good news: you now have access to streaming lossless audio
Bad news: Nearly every device people use now connects through Bluetooth, which doesn’t support lossless audio.
Thankfully I am a Luddite with wires hanging off of every limb
That reminds me, I need to audit my Spotify library, acquire the library another way and cancel my subscription.
Tune my music worked the best from my testing
