Over the past four years, Spotify has made a push toward offering a lot more than music. Both video podcasts and audiobooks were added to the platform, resulting in record-high subscriber counts according to their Q2 2024 earnings reports. To celebrate, CEO Daniel Ek has confirmed that a new subscriber tier will arrive in the future.

Spotify’s Variety Streaming Approach

To most people, Spotify is still known as the biggest name in music streaming. That won’t change anytime soon, as it’s still the driving force behind their service. Even still, Spotify spent over $1 billion bringing high-profile podcasts onto the platform, then doubled down in 2022 with digital audiobooks.

Spotify’s push toward other listenable content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Other streaming markets are gripped by fierce competition while the internet continues to host movies, TV, music and playable games for its massive audiences. In that environment, growing to include more services can be a better option than doubling down on your established content. That’s why businesses like iGaming sites offer more than just slot games, whether it’s a variety of table games or classic games like plinko. That way, visitors can choose to engage with the games they want, to the overall benefit of the site. The same can be said for Spotify, which has brought podcast listeners and avid readers into the fold.

As part of their transformation, Spotify launched an audiobook tier in March 2024. Initially, users had to have a Premium subscription to access their growing library of over 200,000 audiobooks. However, seeing a lot of interest from free users, they decided to offer an audiobook access tier without the other benefits of Premium. That way, readers who don’t care about Spotify’s music content were attracted to the deal.

Spotify’s New Deluxe Tier

After a long period of uncertainty, Spotify’s broad-tent approach seems to have paid off after their Q2 2024 results dropped. It showed that their subscriber base reached 246 million, 12% higher than the previous year. Since Q3 of 2022, Spotify has been steadily adding at least 10 million subscribers every year. While Spotify once had a reputation for never making a profit, 2024 is full of record profit figures.

As the service continues to expand, a new Deluxe tier is set to hit the platform sometime in the near future. CEO Daniel Ek dropped this news in the Q2 earnings call, vaguely suggesting that it’ll be released later this year. Ek was likely referring to Spotify HiFi, a streaming tier that was announced years ago but has since fallen by the wayside. HiFi promised lossless audio streaming, and at the time, it was unclear if it’d come with added benefits.

Now it seems HiFi has been revived as their upcoming Deluxe tier. Ek explained that it’d be “probably around a $17 or $18 price point” and have “other things that I’m not ready to talk about just yet.” Ek also highlighted giving more control to users. Throughout 2023, Spotify added special AI-powered tools that gave paying users more power over their playlists than ever before. Those kinds of quality-of-life upgrades are a shoo-in for the Deluxe package, along with newer features they’ll reveal in the future.

While Spotify has had a good 2024 so far, it’s too early to call their transformation a success just yet. They could easily squander the momentum they’ve built over the last year or so, and unpredictable trends in the music and streaming industries could prove disruptive. They also have strong competitors in Apple Music and YouTube Music, who will doubtlessly learn from Spotify’s growth and try to emulate it.