Way back in February last year, Spotify announced its HiFi tier in a bid to offer lossless music streaming. It promised to deliver music in a CD-quality, lossless audio format. Nearly a year later, Spotify HiFi is nowhere to be seen. Now, the music streaming platform has provided an update on its roll out, but don’t get your hopes up.

Spotify users have been voicing their complaints on its Community website for a while now. In the thread, Spotify attempted to assuage the frustrated users by saying that it plans to provide Premium users with HiFi streaming in the future. However, it still didn’t have any concrete timelines to share.

Here’s the full reply:

We know that HiFi quality audio is important to you. We feel the same, and we’re excited to deliver a Spotify HiFi experience to Premium users in the future. But we don’t have timing details to share yet.

We will of course update you here when we can.

Our Take

In February, last year, Spotify promised HiFi “later this year.” The promised timeline has passed and there is still no sign of the roll out. In June, Apple Music launched lossless and Hi-Res playback, with features such as Spatial Audio along with Dolby Atmos at no extra cost. Though Amazon Music Unlimited and Tidal have been offering lossless audio, it came with a premium subscription price. Apple’s foray into lossless streaming, for free, prompted Amazon to scrap the subscription price.

Now that major streaming services are offering lossless audio for free, Spotify will not be able to milk money from its users for HiFi. With no financial incentive for releasing HiFi, the company may be having second thoughts over releasing the feature soon. Spotify is still one of the most popular music streaming platforms, but it remains to be seen if the lack of lossless audio support will affect it in the future.

Has Spotify’s lack of HiFi support prompted you to switch to Apple Music? Let us know in the comments.