Spotify says it now has 50 million paid subscribers

As The Verge reported, the streaming service Spotify is supposed to start a Hi-Fi offer with uncompressed audio streams, which would deliver music in high quality and is now being tried out by a small group.

The news arrived nearly six months after the company announced its last subscription achievement, passing 40 million paying members in September.

That price is on a par with Tidal’s HiFi subscription, which offers premium features and lossless audio for $19.99 per month.

Offering a hi-fi listening option would further help Spotify differentiate itself from the sea of other streaming music outfits out there.

Music streaming giant Spotify has reached a major milestone – the platform has hit 50 million paying subscribers. While that differentiation hasn’t translated to success for the Jay Z-owned service, Spotify is coming at its neck anyway. Investors in a previous fundraising round have the right to turn their stakes into shares at a discount to the IPO price, with the discount growing if Spotify takes longer to go public.

The news surfaced when various users on Reddit posted screenshots of an offer which was asking them to upgrade to the Hi-Fi tier for pricing ranging from $5 to $10. Previous year was the first time streaming services beat out physical CD purchases, and it’s becoming a dominant driver of revenue in the music industry, according to Billboard. Spotify already offers a family package which grants the premium subscription to up to six users.

Spotify has been among the main players in the music streaming game for a good few years now.

It’s a relatively simple way to generate more revenue from existing customers, though to date the sign-up for higher cost higher quality streams has been relatively modest. This obviously won’t happen, but it could and others such as Apple Music should be anxious. We do know it was at 100 million as of last June, and historically the total has been roughly four times that of its paid user base.