On Monday (February 22nd), during Spotify’s Stream On event, the company highlighted the platform’s impact on the music industry over the past 15 years, and featured a slew of new product announcements. Among their developments were the addition of 80 new markets and an upcoming high-fidelity tier.
The significant accumulation of new markets was explained by the company’s CEO Daniel Ek: “This move will make Spotify available to more than a billion people in new markets around the world, with nearly half of them already using the internet.” The expansion will canvass Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, bringing the total number of Spotify territories to more than 170.
In addition, the music media giant will become the biggest streaming service to announce a high-fidelity tier, following Amazon Music HD’s rollout in September 2019. Notwithstanding the original online shopping platform, high-fidelity streaming audio has been limited to smaller platforms like Tidal, and Deezer. While this additional service should roll out sometime later in the year, Spotify has yet to release details about the audio quality of its HiFi offering, or how much it will cost.
Earlier this month, Spotify reported it had 155 million paid subscribers around the world, with 345 million monthly active users and $9.5 billion in revenue for 2020.
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Photo: Sorosh Tavakoli