Not what we expected, but we’ll take it!
Instead of Supremium, Spotify users may soon have access to high-quality lossless audio, AI-powered playlists, and more through a new “Music Pro” add-on. These insights came from recent findings in the company’s Android app code in the alpha version 8.9.32.328.
Unpacking Spotify’s Music Pro
According to recent findings in Spotify’s Android app code, Spotify’s Supremium plan is most probably turning into an add-on feature named “Music Pro”.
This was found by a Reddit user and computer science student, Hypixely, in the alpha version 8.9.32.328 of the Spotify app. Here, he discovered that Spotify removed mentions of Supremium from its app code, and replaced them with new strings referring to a new feature called Music Pro.
Music Pro retains many of Supremium’s intended features such as:
- 24-bit/44.1 kHz lossless music (FLAC)
- AI-driven playlist creation
- 30 hours of audiobook listening per month
- Enhanced playlist customization options such as sorting by BPM or danceability.
However, the add-on will also provide headphone optimization technology for specific models, including AirPods.
Other users also uncovered potential lossless downloading capabilities.
But instead of a separate plan, like Supremium, it’s seemingly packaged as an additional feature that existing users can choose to add to their current plan.
This, of course, is expected to cost a bit more on top of the regular Spotify Premium subscription but the actual price is yet to be revealed.
More Evidence of Music Pro
Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, also supported the news about Spotify Music Pro.
In a Threads post, he recently shared finding a ‘lossless’ option from the Connect menu.
Here, you can see that users can choose to stream music in lossless quality of up to 1,441 kbps. This is a lot higher than the 320 kbps max stream quality that Spotify is currently offering to all users.
Based on his responses, Chris claims that he can tell that Spotify uses the FLAC format for its lossless setting.
Yet, of course, this hasn’t been rolled out to all users, as it’s probably still in the A/B tests, among many other features.
Why Is Spotify Hi-Fi Taking So Long?
In February 2021, Spotify announced Hi-Fi, promising Premium users an upgrade in sound quality within the year. However, the company delayed the release until 2023 and later planned to include Hi-Fi in the Supremium plan, which now also appears to have been discontinued.
Some say that Apple Music and Amazon Music offering lossless audio at no additional cost disrupted Spotify’s pricing strategy for Hi-Fi.
Daniel Ek himself hinted that the delay was due to a licensing issue during a 2022 earnings meeting.
Spotify’s CEO made his thoughts about music licensing known before, insinuating that some practices were outdated.