In fact, to incentivise current subscribers and new listeners to subscribe to its top HiFi Plus tier, the service's ‘direct-to-artist’ payments now distribute up to 10 per cent of a HiFi Plus subscription to the artists a subscriber listens to the most each month, in addition to standard streaming royalties. Tidal says it is "artist owned" and claims to pay the highest percentage of royalties to songwriters in the streaming market. Unavailable, greyed-out songs are present on Tidal, too, often signifying that the service and record label are mid-negotiation. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell's discographies remain absent following the Joe Rogan debacle. Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify in 2014 over "tiny royalty payments", though she's since made up with the Swedish firm. Spotify has notoriously come in conflict with musicians over royalties and politics over the years. There are some cases where songs will be on one service and not the other. Meanwhile, Spotify hits back with a load of big-hitting podcasts that it and its affiliate studios have produced, many of which it has exclusive rights to. Tidal's hi-res Masters tracks are now in the millions, too, and the service also bolsters its catalogue with an increasing number of tracks mixed in immersive audio technologies Dolby Atmos Music and 360 Reality Audio for subscribers to try. Both services actually offer over 80 million tracks, giving its subscribers a comprehensive catalogue of music to listen to. Given that Spotify launched six years before Tidal, you might think it would have the bigger music library. *Winner: Spotify for free, Tidal for value* hi-res) by supporting Tidal Masters via Master Quality Authenticated ( MQA) technology. Not content with spanking Spotify for CD-quality streaming, Tidal also has a HiFi Plus tier that brings audio quality up to 9216kbps (i.e. Spotify is poised to offer CD-quality streaming via its announced Spotify Hi-Fi tier for an as-yet-unspecified price, though this much-delayed offering is yet to materialise. And Tidal Hi-Fi Family lets six people take advantage of it for £14.99 / $14.99 / AU$17.99 per month. But it does offer higher-quality audio for the same monthly fee as Spotify.įor £9.99 / $9.99 / AU$11.99 per month, Tidal Hi-Fi gets you audio at up to 1411kbps (i.e. ![]() Tidal, on the other hand, does not have a free tier (unless you're in the US, in which case it has ‘Tidal Free’ for 160kbps streaming with “limited interruptions”). It costs £9.99 / $9.99 / AU$11.99 per month.Įven better value is Spotify Premium Family, which gives Premium access to up to six people (nominally from the same household) for £16.99 / $15.99 / AU$17.95 per month. Unless you really want MQA and insist on using your "full" MQA-decode DAC for the novelty, I would recommend saving 50% and sticking with the standard HiFi tier.There’s plenty to persuade people to pay for Spotify Premium, mind: improved (approximately 320kbps) streams, offline listening, the freedom to search and skip tracks on mobile devices and, of course, no adverts. ![]() whether it's "lossless", whether it actually does anything beneficial for time domain performance - it doesn't) in the MQA/Tidal literature which confounds what's fact and what's fiction. ![]() There's a lot of playing with numbers and making claims about this and that (eg. What Tidal says about "9216 kbps" is the upsampled lossy MQA bitrate. Unless someone shows us where it is, there is no "three layers" of MQA unless we really stretch some definitions and say "lossy decode of stuff above 22.05/24kHz" as step one, upsampling to something like 192kHz as step 2, and the use of low-quality filtering (compared to something like HQPlayer as an example of good filtering) as layer 3 or something like that.Īnyhow, Tidal HiFi+ streams up to 24/48 (equivalent ~2300kbps uncompressed). For true bit-perfect hi-res, usually audiophiles recommend Qobuz (sadly still not available here in Canada). When playing music, it's no better than 16-bit audio. As usual, while MQA could sound somewhat different due to the DSP they use encoding the data (sometimes they fool around with the amplitude), remember that it's not lossless hi-res audio.
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