Most popular streaming services offer a hi-fi streaming quality setting to paying subscribers. This setting lets you hear greater detail, just as artists would have heard it when creating the track. Apple Music, Deezer, and Tidal offer hi-fi streaming for a price, but Spotify doesn’t treat even Premium subscribers to CD-quality audio. It confirmed its plans to bring hi-fi to customers in 2021, but the company didn’t say when it would arrive. A survey presented to a Spotify user recently suggests we may not need to wait much longer, but the price for it may be exceptionally high.

Redditor u/nearlymind canceled their Spotify Premium subscription to switch to Apple Music, but Spotify presented a survey asking if the user would consider paying for Spotify Platinum in the next 30 days (via What Hi-Fi). If this survey is to be believed, we could see Spotify Platinum roll out in November. Benefits of the new plan include hi-fi streaming support, Studio Sound, a Headphone Tuner utility, Audio Insights, Library Pro, Playlist Pro, and Limited ad-supported Spotify podcasts.

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Although the survey doesn’t say, the redditor believes Playlist Pro would resemble Apple Music’s Smart Playlists feature, which automatically adds songs to the playlist if they fit your predefined criteria for that list. They say Library Pro could be like the Apple Music library, where users can edit metadata for songs, including artists, albums, and the genre. Hopefully, this is the case, and free-tier users don’t lose support for library and playlist management features.

Spotify’s pricing for the Platinum tier, assuming that’s the consumer-facing branding, is rather ambitious, and the survey suggests it could go for $20 a month. To put that into perspective, Spotify Premium costs half as much at just $10. While rivals like Apple Music and Amazon Music offer lossless and hi-fi streaming for $10 a month, this proposed pricing would be roughly in line with Tidal's, with a $20 HiFi Plus tier for audiophiles.

As if that wasn't pricey enough, we're also getting some info about possible group pricing, with a survey suggesting Platinum could cost $29 a month for what looks like its Family Plan, with a free month-long trial to start. That price would be $13 more than the current $16 associated with Spotify Premium's Family Plan. If the screenshot of the survey is anything to go by, we assume six accounts could share a Platinum Family Plan, just like a Premium one. That would certainly make the pricing feel more reasonable than $20 for a single person.

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That said, there has been little hullabaloo around Spotify hi-fi lately, and the survey suggests the service is still gauging how much money audiophiles will willingly cough up for the feature. It feels like a rollout could happen within a month, but there’s no official confirmation from the company. For now, we're all play the waiting game, so if you want hi-fi, switching to another streaming service isn’t too difficult.