During Spotify's latest earnings call, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek gave his clearest indication yet that the company's long-expected 'Supremium' tier really is coming… at some point.
"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 this normal Spotify version has, but a lot more control, a lot higher quality across the board," Ek said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
That certainly fits with everything we've heard about Spotify Supremium so far, including the latest leaks that reveal a ton about the future Supremium options, and the likely support for hi-res audio.
And we'd long heard that it was likely to cost around $5 more than the general Spotify Premium price, so the prices mentioned by Ek fit with that.
However, even though Supremium keeps leaking out in seemingly quite finished forms, Ek says that plans for this service are in the "early days". Now, one might think that this statement is so vague, it could mean the service arrives in two months, or two years.
It really seems like we shouldn't be waiting too long for Supremium now… but we've been waiting so long already, I definitely wouldn't recommend that you start holding your breath at this point.
People will pay
Will people pay $5 more to get their music in higher quality? Ek has good reason to be optimistic about it, considering how easy his company has found it to get people to pay more for music in the same quality as before.
Despite Spotify's latest price hike, the company increased its number of paying subscribers by 12% year-on-year – Ek said that "We’re seeing less churn in this round of increases, than we did in our prior one", meaning that this price rise caused a smaller portion of its subscribers to cancel than in the past.
So it seems like Spotify's paying customers aren't that price-sensitive, which suggests that a good number of them will be willing to pay more for an even better service – set to offer other perks in addition to lossless audio. These will be important, because many of the best music streaming services now offer lossless audio without any kind of price premium, so Spotify will have to give people a good reason to pay more for Supremium.
Or maybe it doesn't even need to give you that good a reason – Spotify's social aspect alone is a huge part of why the price hikes didn't put people off, and why people will pay more for Supremium if it offers more cool collaboration options.
As my colleague Becky Scarrott explained in her piece 'Why you'll still pay Spotify $5 extra for 'HiFi' even when lossless costs nothing on Apple Music': "To paraphrase Russ Tamblyn's glorious Jet Song from West Side Story, when you're on Spotify, you're on Spotify all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day. I'm an Apple Music gal now, but occasionally – when I'm asked to contribute to an office playlist, say – it can still feel isolating."
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