Deezer HiFi With Hi-Res Quality: 24bit/96kHz or more

What's the hold up Deezer? Want to stay relevant and competitive or not?

hey there ​@evany 

i can't speak for the company (I'm not an employee), but if I had to guess, it would be that 1) labels simply don't produce enough hi-res tracks to make it worthwhile, and 2) customer demand isn’t there.

Apple Music and Qobuz have <10% of their catalog as hi-res, Amazon Music has not released numbers, and Tidal is a complete cluster as they still sift through lingering MQA tracks.

Spotify isn’t doing high-res and YouTube Music isn’t even lossless.

No one outside a small niche cares about it, and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Streaming cost would explode. For example back then Spotify was only $9.99 CAD. After they bundled podcasts, audiobooks and loseless audio the price rose from $9.99 > $10.99 > $11.99 (2024) > $12.99 (2026). This means if you want master quality sound, more bandwidth costs for Deezer. More bandwidth = expensive.

Thats the hold up. Sure they can make an additional tier plan (like HiFi Plus) but this is a reputational risk since they just removed HiFi tier not too long ago. 

I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure what the point would be without exclusive mode.  That’s way more relevant to music quality.  It has an objective effect of making your hardware able to produce better sound, whereas there are a lot of cases where it’s debatable if our ears can even hear the difference between two different qualities of FLAC.  There are many more things at play that determine what quality our music sounds like than the bitrate.