Spotify is launching a new Premium membership tier called HiFi, which brings lossless, CD-quality audio to the streaming platform for the first time.

The news was announced during the company's Stream On event.

What Is Spotify HiFi?

As announced during Stream On, a Spotify event where the streaming service discussed its plans for the future, Spotify HiFi is a new tier that provides lossless audio streaming.

This will be the first time that CD-quality audio has been available widely on Spotify—the service only supports up to 320kbps currently. HiFi will also support some Spotify Connect-enabled speakers, so you can stream losslessly through your fancy audio equipment.

Lossless audio means that you should be able to hear details in songs that you couldn't before, since there's less compression, though it depends on what you're listening to it through. It's unlikely that you'll notice the difference on budget earbuds.

To celebrate the announcement, Spotify produced a video with singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and record producer Finneas to get their views on the importance of high-quality audio.

Spotify HiFi is expected to launch later this year, though exact details about pricing and availability are unknown. Spotify's blog post simply refers to "select markets".

Amazon Music and Tidal already offer lossless audio, priced at $14.99/month and $19.99/month respectively. It's unlikely that Spotify HiFi is going to be more expensive than these.