It’s now been almost four years to the day since Spotify promised to introduce a new HiFi tier offering lossless HD audio by the end of 2021. To date, nothing has materialized, other than lots of rumors about what else a high-end tier might contain to keep up with the likes of Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and Tidal, which all already offer lossless audio.
The most recent official acknowledgement came in a 2024 earnings call, when CEO Daniel Ek confirmed that Spotify Deluxe was in the works later in the year. True to form, it missed that deadline, but a new report from Bloomberg suggests something may finally arrive in 2025 — and it actually sounds quite exciting.
Now called Music Pro — by our count the fourth name for it, after HiFi, Supremium and Deluxe — the most exciting reported feature is the ability for subscribers to “mix together songs from different artists.” This will in part lean on artificial intelligence, according to Bloomberg’s sources, which could lower the bar of technical skill needed for creativity to flourish.
On top of this and the higher-quality audio, the company is also apparently “testing various ways to sell concert tickets, such as giving fans access to presales or better seats.” This is at the “preliminary talks” stage with promoters and ticket sellers.
While the article suggests that the service could cost as much as $5.99 a month on top of an existing subscription (which currently ranges from $5 per month for students to $20 for families), neither pricing nor the launch timeline have been finalized, because Spotify is yet to acquire rights from all the major record labels, the sources claim. As you might expect, however, price will vary by geography, with lower costs in “less-developed markets.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about possible extras Spotify has considered to try and tempt subscribers to pay for an add-on. Indeed, last April, a Reddit user found the Music Pro name in a code dive, along with references to lossless audio, “advanced mixing tools”, the ability to filter your music library by mood or activity and headphone optimization.
While some of these features aren’t mentioned in today’s report, it’s possible they will be part of the software eventually. Bloomberg’s sources claim that Spotify aims to add “tools and features over time” and will “test many options over the course of this year.”
Hopefully that means that 2025 is the year the app finally catches up with the best music streaming services on the all-important audio quality metric — for serious audiophiles, anything else is just a bonus.
