Spotify announced plans for a high-fidelity tier way back in early 2021. Since then, we haven't heard much about it. At the beginning of 2022, Spotify issued a non-update, saying that it appreciated excitement about the feature but didn't have timing details to share. Now, in an interview with The Verge, Spotify co-president Gustav Söderström has said that the feature is still still in the works, but the company is also still tight-lipped about when we can expect to see it.

On an episode of The Verge's Decoder podcast published this week, Söderström said the holdup in Spotify's high-fidelity offering is due changes in the music streaming space at large. "We announced it, but then the industry changed for a bunch of reasons," Söderström said. Söderström didn't elaborate on what specific industry trends have delayed Spotify's plans, but it seems like broader availability of high-fidelity audio streaming may be playing a part.

"There is a risk that you unnecessarily commoditize yourself if you just do what everyone else does, and just try to do it the cheapest or the fastest," Söderström said. "We want to do something where we thought it through." Söderström stressed that the plan is still in motion, though, and when pressed, added "I don’t want to give it away because we want to try to do something that is our own and unique."

There's been increasing interest in hi-fi streaming in recent years. Services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, and Qobuz all offer high-fidelity options, and many of the best earbuds support high-res codecs like aptX and LDAC or, in the case of Samsung, 24-bit audio playback. With 205 million Premium subscribers as of last year, Spotify is the most popular dedicated audio streaming service around — but if its features can't keep up with the competition, we could eventually see that start to shift.