Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Monday, February 22nd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Spotify's new Hi-Fi subscription tier. Clubhouse has security concerns.

Apple is king of the smartphone hill once again.

Maybe the biggest survival story of the COVID-19 era is about to IPO and is the Facebook news band pushing Australians into the arms

of the news publishers themselves.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

As I'm recording this Spotify has just wrapped up its Spotify Stream On Event in which it announced a bunch of stuff including new tools for creators, new monetizing options, even an ad marketplace for podcasts, which might

be too in the weeds for our purposes, although I reserve the right to reassess that later. What is probably more interesting for normal

consumers for us at the moment is the fact that Spotify is launching a new

subscription product later this year called Hi-Fi that will offer CD quality

lossless audio quoting the verge. Spotify has done small tests of higher

quality streaming in the past but now it's going to launch the

feature more widely with the caveat that it will be available only in select

markets and pricing is yet to be announced higher quality streaming has

apparently been among the top requests from its customers.

As it stands today, Spotify tops out at 320 KBPS audio.

Amazon rolled out Amazon Music HD in 2019, The Lossless Plan costs $14.99 per month or $12.99 per month for

Prime customers a premium over the standard Amazon Music Unlimited Service.

Title, which has supported high resolution audio since its very beginning, is priced slightly

higher at $19.99 per month for the Hi-Fi plan.

Title offers what it calls title masters that go up to high resolution 96

kilohertz 24-bit audio. Smaller services like Kubas have also sought to appeal to audio files with lossless streaming.

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