Spotify Supremium

FloriduhBoy said:

Spotify's GUI and music selected for you algorithm are worth the extra coin. I'll definitely give the lossless service a go.

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Their algorithm might not even be that different but there are just so many more people on Spotify that, if you have somewhat obscure tastes, its going to have more data to scrounge from to figure you out. They probably have ten? twenty? times the number of listeners as Tidal? Tidal always offers up the most expected, basic, tracks for me. "Do you want to hear Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison?" "NO!!! I love Van Morrison as you've noticed, but NO! I never want to hear that song again!" Whereas Spotify will dig up some hidden gem off of Veedon Fleece that I haven't heard in 15 years, and I'll smile and go about my day.

JohnVF said:

Their algorithm might not even be that different but there are just so many more people on Spotify that, if you have somewhat obscure tastes, its going to have more data to scrounge from to figure you out. They probably have ten? twenty? times the number of listeners as Tidal? Tidal always offers up the most expected, basic, tracks for me. "Do you want to hear Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison?" "NO!!! I love Van Morrison as you've noticed, but NO! I never want to hear that song again!" Whereas Spotify will dig up some hidden gem off of Veedon Fleece that I haven't heard in 15 years, and I'll smile and go about my day.

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I started streaming with Spotify in 2012 using an iPod and Pure Audio dock. I hope the algorithm won't change with lossless. Amazon appears to be attempting to mimic Spotify but, IMHO, it's not as good.

I've gotten two emails offering Tidal for $2 a month for two months. I wonder why? I'll pass though.

FloriduhBoy said:

I've gotten two emails offering Tidal for $2 a month for two months. I wonder why?

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You know why, they sense they are about to get crushed by the big boys and are making every last desperate attempt to gain paid subscribers, knowing many people resist change.

So all they have to do is get you in the door and a certain % will just stay after that, instead of make a change. It won't work, they are already getting crushed, once lossless is fully rolled out by Apple and Spotify, that combined with Amazon HD at $7.99/mo. for Prime members and $9.99/mo. for everyone else likely means game over for TIDAL, and sadly perhaps Qobuz too.

Roon seems to sense this too, said to now be in a rush to integrate Deezer, lest they be left with no streaming partner.

MikeyFresh said:

You know why, they sense they are about to get crushed by the big boys and are making every last desperate attempt to gain paid subscribers, knowing many people resist change.

So all they have to do is get you in the door and a certain % will just stay after that, instead of make a change. It won't work, they are already getting crushed, once lossless is fully rolled out by Apple and Spotify, that combined with Amazon HD at $7.99/mo. for Prime members and $9.99/mo. for everyone else likely means game over for TIDAL, and sadly perhaps Qobuz too.

Roon seems to sense this too, said to now be in a rush to integrate Deezer, lest they be left with no streaming partner.

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Qobuz seems to at least have some good will behind it- less of us happily stabbing it in the back and running away like we are with Tidal (which I don't miss in even the slightest way). If Spotify goes beyond CD quality I might leave Qobuz but if not, Qobuz is cheap enough to stay a part of my life. I just cut Sling at $30 out of my video streaming life... no more live TV for me... so I have some wiggle room for streaming cost

More tease from Spotify. It does have a great GUI and the music recommendations based on what you listen to are excellent.

FloriduhBoy said:

More tease from Spotify. It does have a great GUI and the music recommendations based on what you listen to are excellent.

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Hard to believe they announced this way back in February as being available "later this year", and now it is certainly later this year, with both Apple and Amazon having long ago beaten Spotify to the punch while setting the precedent that lossless doesn't cost anything extra.

I'm especially surprised at this slow roll out given Spotify first mentioned lossless, and even launched a beta test of some sort, as far back as Q1 2017. That said, only a very small portion of Spotify's customer base cares about lossless, I'm sure they haven't lost any appreciable number of paid subscribers over this painfully slow roll out, they are still dwarfing the other services excepting perhaps only Apple.

I'd be curious as to just what kind of bump Apple Music has seen in subscriber numbers (if any) since rolling out lossless and spatial audio.

I’d bet it has to do with lack of interest. Their scale suggests they’re doing fine

I guess they also no longer have any real reason to be in a hurry at all, given how quickly both Apple and Amazon made their countering moves last spring. Spotify now likely only cares about just getting it right, taking their time to make sure that any kinks reported by the beta testers are worked out, and that no bugs are introduced that would potentially have a negative impact on an already happy customer base.

JohnVF said:

I’d bet it has to do with lack of interest. Their scale suggests they’re doing fine.

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The whole streaming industry is molded in jello. I wonder how large the potential market is for lossless or higher rez streaming?

Amazon appears to be attempting to emulate Spotify. Their recommendations are getting better, but the GUI is the pits.

With thoughts of good karma and in hopeful anticipation of the Spotify HiFi lossless feature, I've decided to take a trial of Spotify Premium, currently 3 months free in the U.S.

While it would be cool if this lossless feature advertised in late February as available by years' end in select markets actually materializes as a nice holiday gift to subscribers, I personally just hope it to be available sometime well prior to my Premium trial expiring in mid-March 2022.

In the meantime I'll give their lossy streams a whirl with the Spotify Renderers enabled on Raspberry Pi-based Volumio and Moode endpoint/streamers:

After enabling the Spotify, and Spotify Connect plugins in the Volumio settings, I'm up and running on the humble RPi Zero 2 W, using the Connect feature of the macOS Spotify desktop client:



Many (most) people would probably use a phone or tablet and the Connect feature to control the Spotify interface as opposed to a desktop client, however I also see that it can actually be controlled from directly within Volumio's browser based GUI too:



While the above all requires a Spotify Premium subscription, it seems to run perfectly well on the free version of Volumio for Raspberry Pi, even on the little $15 RPi Zero 2 W.

JohnVF said:

I’d bet it has to do with lack of interest. Their scale suggests they’re doing fine.

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I'm not sure how a company goes from a big announcement via Livestream, to 9+ months of radio silence. Good companies typically only announce something when a decision to move forward with it has been reached, and development has a somewhat near end in sight.

If there had been some grand lack of perceived interest in lossless, then they probably wouldn't have said in the Livestream that it was one of the most requested features, nor ever announced anything about it at all. Their scale has always suggested they were doing fine, nothing new there, they've had by far the most paid subs for many years now. But that doesn't mean they wanted to allow growing competitors with deep pockets in Apple and Amazon to gain any greater foothold than they already have.

Real companies don't announce vaporware, thats just poor management. I sincerely hope that Spotify doesn't pull a replay of their 2017 "forthcoming lossless" announcement at CES, whose failure to materialize personally turned me off to the extent I've only had a passing interest in Spotify until just now with this Premium trial I've commenced. Thats literally years they could have had a paying customer but didn't, and although I'm going to be in a small minority of people there, I'm not the only dude on earth that feels this way. If nothing happens (again) with Spotify lossless, I simply will not be their paid customer, though certainly 99% of their current subscribers probably wouldn't notice or care.

Looking forward to this!

MikeyFresh said:

I'm not sure how a company goes from a big announcement via Livestream, to 9+ months of radio silence. Good companies typically only announce something when a decision to move forward with it has been reached, and development has a somewhat near end in sight.

If there had been some grand lack of perceived interest in lossless, then they probably wouldn't have said in the Livestream that it was one of the most requested features, nor ever announced anything about it at all. Their scale has always suggested they were doing fine, nothing new there, they've had by far the most paid subs for many years now. But that doesn't mean they wanted to allow growing competitors with deep pockets in Apple and Amazon to gain any greater foothold than they already have.

Real companies don't announce vaporware, thats just poor management. I sincerely hope that Spotify doesn't pull a replay of their 2017 "forthcoming lossless" announcement at CES, whose failure to materialize personally turned me off to the extent I've only had a passing interest in Spotify until just now with this Premium trial I've commenced. Thats literally years they could have had a paying customer but didn't, and although I'm going to be in a small minority of people there, I'm not the only dude on earth that feels this way. If nothing happens (again) with Spotify lossless, I simply will not be their paid customer, though certainly 99% of their current subscribers probably wouldn't notice or care.

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Being optimistic, perhaps that is why Spotify is offering the freebie premium now? If they roll out lossless in the next month or so they may be thinking that most of the freebie users will become paying customers. Spotify has a forum and posters have been requesting lossless for a good while.

FloriduhBoy said:

Being optimistic, perhaps that is why Spotify is offering the freebie premium now? If they roll out lossless in the next month or so they may be thinking that most of the freebie users will become paying customers. Spotify has a forum and posters have been requesting lossless for a good while.

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I was thinking the same when I started the trial, if memory serves, the previous freebie period was 1 month?
I guess it could just be an entirely unrelated holiday promotion or something to that effect, but I'm hoping the lossless feature is now imminent and I can make use of it sooner than later.

So far for me personally, using Spotify Connect as is with either Moode or Volumio is working out just fine. This morning I was using the Search function within the Volumio web browser-based interface and it seems to work very well, even if it lacks the last ounce of visual impact that you get when using the actual Spotify desktop client.

In terms of sound quality, it's been shall we say... interesting. While the tonal balance is pleasing enough, and the typical source file's mastering and quality seems to be quite good, it's still more suitable as background music for me, and more likely I'd play it on something other than my main system. Using Spotify's compressed streams on my big rig sort of rather misses the point, as I'm not getting the same kind of stereo sound stage, nor dynamic contrast, that I do with lossless on Qobuz.

That said, if I were to ask myself if Spotify's lossy streams are surprisingly good sounding, or better than what I was expecting, and that answer is yes. My lowish expectation there was probably tainted by previous run-ins with things like iTunes at 128kbps, or even Spotify at 160kbps. The current 320kbps Spotify offering is much better than that, though falling short of lossless in the areas I mentioned, and thats completely OK for what I'd call background level listening, for example their Christmas playlist which seems to have been very tastefully curated. I'm not a big playlist type of guy, I still tend to play albums on my main system, but playlists are quite useful for things like holiday background music.

NSBulk said:

Spotify is still working on HiFi streaming, but won't say when it's coming

The service previously said it would offer Spotify HiFi in some markets in 2021.

www.engadget.com

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Definitely good to hear something other than radio silence, however brief or uninformative.

I guess it remains to be seen if Spotify are just putting some sort of finishing touches on the whole thing, or if they are just stumped business plan-wise as to how they will price this, after those preemptive strikes by Apple and Amazon last spring. They know that they can't win a price war with the heavies in the room, nor should they even try to, when they have by far the most popular paid service to date.

MikeyFresh said:

With thoughts of good karma and in hopeful anticipation of the Spotify HiFi lossless feature, I've decided to take a trial of Spotify Premium, currently 3 months free in the U.S.

While it would be cool if this lossless feature advertised in late February as available by years' end in select markets actually materializes as a nice holiday gift to subscribers, I personally just hope it to be available sometime well prior to my Premium trial expiring in mid-March 2022.

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My 90-day free trial of Spotify Premium expired today, and I've killed it prior to the auto-renewal.

No lossless rollout and radio silence on the subject have me less than impressed, this is the 2nd time since 2017 that Spotify have reneged on this feature supposedly being imminent in the U.S.

Real companies typically don't announce vaporware, twice in 5 years. I guess they are preoccupied with podcasts and all that bullshit, which literally blew up in their face somewhat recently. Seemed like a golden opportunity to appease subscribers, and also maybe change the narrative a bit with some positive news, alas it wasn't to be.

So basically they lied.

Drugolf said:

So basically they lied.

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It sure does look that way, or maybe reneged is a better word, reneged twice in 5 years that is. As such I've renamed this thread from "Spotify launching HiFi lossless streaming in 2021" to "Spotify launching HiFi lossless streaming ever?".

Spotify's shares are down 50% YTD, though they were up 6% today after their Investor Day event in which founder Daniel Ek predicted annual revenue of over $100 billion inside of 10 years.

Revenue in 2021 was $10.9 billion, so that will be an incredible meteoric rise if it comes true. What's interesting in the context of this thread, as well as that of the related "Sobering Look at the Music Industry in 2021" thread, is that Ek made almost no mention of music streaming as providing this predicted growth. Rather, they've pinned their hopes and dreams on podcasts, and now add to that audiobooks too.

So Spotify is telling investors that with 40% gross margins and 20% operating margins they will go from losing money every quarter to $100 billion in annual revenue in 10 years powered by podcasts and audiobooks. They cite a 300% rise in podcast revenue in 2021 as evidence of the potential there.

I'll believe it when I see it, but maybe thats because I admit I've never been either a podcast or an audiobook type of guy, and I really don't see that changing with this old dog.

Sadly to bring it back on topic for this thread, not only did Spotify renege on lossless streaming in 2021, they are now quickly approaching 6 months into 2022 with just one vague mention of it still being on their roadmap way back in January, and no further details let alone an actual timetable, or an admission of what exactly the holdup/challenges are that have caused them to renege.

I am beyond unimpressed by a company that twice in 5 years reneges on something that competitors both large and small have managed to roll out with little difficulty. I can only conclude they were never really interested in being a music streaming platform unless it was wildly profitable, and their top execs and investors are completely infatuated with making some huge greedy killing much more so than they are in delivering a sustainable music streaming platform that is fair to all stakeholders.

I've upgraded my Qobuz subscription to Sublime to realize up to 50% savings on download purchases, and I'll keep my money with them as long as they are there. If we come to an unfortunate day when the little guys like Qobuz cease to exist, I'll listen to my downloads and my disc rips, and just leave it at that, unless Amazon or Apple have improved their offering by then.