Hey everyone,

I am an avid music listener on all my devices and I've been using several different music streaming services over the years to try them all and see which one was the most suitable for me. I was always bouncing between Spotify and Apple Music, and wanted to try out Tidal because of friends' recommendations. I took the free trial month at the end of January, used it for multiple occasions (home, commute, travel...) and here is my review.

Pros:

Starting with the good things, I loved how central the music is! This may seem stupid but Tidal really puts the emphasis on the music service first rather than pushing podcasts or certain artists blindly. This can be seen in the 'clickable' names throughout the interface to see music producers, composer, sound engineer... for EVERY track, how cool is that? I also loved the overall premiumness of the interface, the Tidal built-in playlists are well-organised and easy to navigate. As for songs recommendations, I actually liked them most of the time! One month is short for a service to refine my profile but overall I actually discovered new songs or rediscovered artists who were "lost" in my Spotify/AM daily listening habits.

Sound quality was the biggest hope I had before installing Tidal and I wasn't disappointed. I listened to it through multiple sources, either on wired headphones or speakers (B&W P7 and Edifier) to test the lossless Hifi quality or most often in normal mode on Bluetooth devices (car, Sony WH-1000XM4, AirPods...) and it sounded as good as AM and better than Spotify which does not offer any lossless mode at the moment. I also loved that Tidal took the time to develop quality apps for most of my devices, including standalone iPad and Apple Watch apps which are not merely replicating the iPhone app design.

Pricing was finally quite competitive, especially when compared to the increased prices of AM/Spotify over the last months. For students like myself, Tidal with Hifi quality comes at €4.99/month in Western Europe which is a very enticing offer!

Cons (I'll be more structured here with a bullet point list):

• Search is just BAD. I read before trying Tidal that its search was sometimes imprecise and could lead to unwanted results. I was used to bad search of AM compared to the overall excellent one of Spotify (which works with filters too!) but Tidal is another level below that. Example with the latest song of the British band Depeche Mode: type "Ghost Again" and not "Ghosts Again" with the -s and Tidal won't return you the song, like WHY? It was also a pain in the arse for me to find an artist whose name I misspelled and I had to open Google or Spotify to find the correct one! It is especially irritating in situations where you have little control on your screen like in the car.

• App stability is disappointed. Many times, I ran into the issue of a buggy iOS app when it said it did not have any connection (I had to restart it) or when I started a track and it froze the screen without any reason. AM can also be buggy and Spotify is generally the most stable in that field but Tidal app feels buggy and "sluggish" at certain times.- Library management suffers from the same issue as Spotify. I sometimes read music services can fall either in the playlist-oriented or album-oriented camp. Although Tidal is better than Spotify for that, it just doesn't leave me with the impression I was managing my music library like I do with AM. I am much more an album-oriented person (hence my conclusion below) and missed the smart playlists, the beautiful album grid...

• Tidal lack of popularity can be problematic. This point has different consequences and I'm not talking about the lack of marketing around it (at least in Europe) although this could be a problem for the financial people running the service. Tidal is stuck between two sides, the utterly well-known Spotify which is the most popular among my friends and has many social features (playlist collaboration, availability everywhere, public playlists choice...) and AM which offers a great sound quality (and Dolby Atmos), human-curated playlists, radios and more fine-grained control over your music library. AM is also, just like Spotify, available on many more devices than Tidal. I miss the TV (LG OS) and Playstation apps for instance.

• Personal music management is inferior to AM. Like Spotify, there is no good way to manage local files and merge them with the streaming library. It's one of the main strengths of AM and it does it so smoothly.

Overall, I liked my experience on Tidal but did not find enough pros to counterbalance its cons. The main ones being the fuzzy search and the app stability. For my own use and having mainly Apple devices, AM has a better value proposition with a similar premium sound quality,is available on more devices, a better library management and also more financial value with a student price of €5.99/month which includes the TV video service. Someone looking for better social features could also be disappointed by Tidal and prefer Spotify.

Thanks for your time!

I know you get cd level sound quality but I’ve heard the app is quite glitchy, also Spotifys recommendations are what have formed about 90% of my music taste so idk if tidals recommendations are as good. Can someone help me decide?

Update: I got the tidal free trial to try it out and while the quality was slightly better, I soon realised that there was no (free) way to transfer my (multiple) playlists with over 700 tracks, so looks like I’ll be staying with Spotify for now. Thanks for all the replies

UPDATE UPDATE: Bro wth it’s been like ten minutes I went back to Spotify and it’s literally unlistenable now what is this sorcery. Tidal it is. Just a little quieter than Spotify is all

As many have heard, Spotify plan are increasing yet again. I’ve contemplated switching, but I got grandfathered into the Spotify with Hulu plan somehow and having Hulu and Spotify all for the price of one premium subscription is nice. But I’ve honestly been contemplating switching as I’ve noticed their curated mixes and DJ feature have been going down hill, and 2 price hikes in the same year is getting close to pushing me to the edge to switch.

I’ve been a Spotify premium user for years, and a tidal user for a couple years before Spotify but switched because it was giving me too many issues, but what are your guys pros/cons between Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music? Does Apple Music have these curated playlists or DJ feature? (I’m a big fan of the DJ feature but it’s slowly gone downhill and find myself using it less and less because of how bad it’s gotten).

About a year ago I changed to Tidal, from Spotify, but I still use Spotify for podcasts. The primary reason as to why I switched to Tidal is the bitrate (I went for their at the time HiFi 1XXX bitrate subscribtion as a student). I had just gotten my Sony WH-1000XM5 at the time, but I often find myself wondering why in the world Tidal does not have certain songs, altough their libary is huge I've never had this problem with Spotify before. So my question is whether or not Tidal is actually better in terms of audio quality when listening though Sony WH-1000XM5, or the Sony Linkbuds-S

i just started tidal's free 1 month trial because I've been getting so tired of spotify's bull over the past few years. (the increased focus on AI, this year's awful wrapped, all the typical corporate stuff, premium getting more expensive every year, etc)

I can't really find any good pros other than it's not spotify. with tidal, as far as I know, you can't change your playlist covers, you can't add a pfp unless you have one of 3 apps I don't ever intend on getting, the mechanism of adding songs to playlists is more time consuming than it should be, etc.

i REALLY want to like this app. i'm looking for good music apps other than spotify or apple music, but I keep running into things on tidal that would be a downgrade from spotify. if i'm paying about the same each month, it's gotta be better overall.

are there any features tidal offers that set it apart from and above spotify? if so, what are they?

Edit: for context, I don't have any quality sound systems -- my crappy bluetooth earbuds recently broke so i've been stuck with wired, my car's sound system is abysmal, and I don't have headphones. good quality sound is REALLY nice, but I don't currently have access to a way to benefit from that feature.

I used to use Spotify until around April this year when I thought I'd give Tidal a try with their free trial on the Hifi+ tier subscription and I haven't looked back. It may cost twice as much as Spotify but the quality is second to none so I'm just curious what you guys prefer using to stream music.

I’m thinking about moving because tidal has better audio quality and pays artists more. I have Spotify premium and am looking at getting the Tidal equivalent. On an iPhone and car has Apple car play and I need Alexa compatibility. I don’t use AI features or listen to podcasts on Spotify, so I presume I won’t miss out on anything.

Edit: I’m going to use the 30 day free trial

I like Tidal and subscribe but they seem insistant on charging almost double the cost of Apple, Amazon, Qobuz, Deezer etc for a similar tier of quality.

Do you think they can sustain this long term? Why do we pay more when other services cost less?

I’ve used Spotify forever but since joining this sub and others like it I’ve read a lot about how Apple Music and Tidal have way higher audio quality. I don’t have a fancy setup at all, I use the wired earbuds that come with iPhones and have edifier bookshelf speakers at home for my vinyls. Is it worth it to switch to Apple Music or tidal with this equipment? I’d have to convince my entire family to switch to the family plans of either service so if it’s not a noticeable difference I’ll wait until I have a higher quality system and can get one of them for myself

Hello everyone. I have Spotify and i'm willing to chance to Tidal. Is the Quality of sound better? I do see when i play songs "low" / "high" / MAX.

The corporate overlords are Spotify are getting greedy again and doing another price increase.

I'm fine to pay it, but I hear Tidal has a great interface and pays the bands better.

Does anyone here use Tidal and can vouch for the metalcore library? Spotify actually does an amazing job of helping me discover new bands. I just saw Make Them Suffer and I actually knew every song without knowing it because I just let Spotify do its thing while I'm working.

T: tidal, A: apple music, S: spotify)

Use time:

T: 1 month

A: 3 months

S: 4 months

Audio quality:

T: 9/10, sounds great, but i don't really like MQA

A: 7/10, not as good as Tidal

S: 6/10, very similar to Apple Music, sometimes a bit quieter

Discovery/recommendations

T: 6/10, i only used Tidal for a month but my recommendations were good, I enjoy the daily mixes a lot

A: 5/10, they were fine

S: 10/10, i discovered SO many new artists and songs on Spotify, curated playlists are top notch

UI/UX (android)

T: 9/10, looks very clean, smooth, everything is laid out well, but i encountered some very minor bugs

S: 8/10, kinda messy but never buggy

A: 3/10, android app is rough and unpolished, very buggy, the iPad app once glitched so hard to the point where it was unusable

Other features:

T: when a song is created by 2 or more artists, you can choose which artist's profile you want to go to (there's no way to check the profile of the featured artist on AM)

A: ....idk

S: song psychic/playlist in a bottle and podcasts (but they're kinda useless)

I have two Questions.

First is there a difference in sound quality that I notice even if I’m not an audiophile?

Second is the algorithm nearly as good as Spotify’s.

Example: When I create a Spotify playlist it shows me right under it songs that match with the playlist. The success rate that I like these songs is somewhat 20%.

Do you hear that Tidal (Hifi) has better music stream quality (higher bit rate) than Spotify (Premium) and can you give an example song?

I just got a Tidal membership for the first time yesterday and was immediately surprised when I shuffled Nine Inch Nails and the first few tracks to pop up were remixes or non-singles. Mixes seem to have a much more "This is the song you will like" feel, as opposed to "This is the song you SHOULD like, based on our algorithm's interpretation of one billion people's opinion."

I've only had the subscription for a day, so maybe I'm missing something, but it makes me wonder who services are FOR. Personally, I'm thrilled. This style of curation is very much up my alley. I got really tired of Spotify assuming I wanted to (sticking with NIN here) listen to "Closer" or "The Hand that Feeds" for the thousandth time. I want to encounter new and surprising tracks by artists I already know really well.

What do you look for when you go into an unknown listening experience? Familiar bops or uncharted territory? Why would the two services take such different approaches?