Choosing the best music streaming service for your needs can be a bit tricky; While streaming is still relatively new to the grand scheme of listening to music, there are so many platforms to choose from these days, two of the biggest being Spotify and Tidal. Spotify is currently the most popular streaming service in the world, with 113 million subscribers in October last year and growing; and this despite the growing competition from Apple Music. Spotify isn't perfect as a service, however, and its lossy audio streams have left audiophiles interested in a bit more fidelity; that's where Tidal comes in. With a focus on delivering hi-res audio at CD-like quality, the platform was acquired in 2015 by hip-hop star Jay-Z, becoming the first major artist-owned music service. . As such, Tidal claims to pay higher royalties than its competitors to artists and songwriters. It's not just a matter of ethics and audio quality; Spotify and Tidal offer different user experiences, pricing structures, and music catalogs. Making the best decision for your needs can be confusing, to say the least. That's why we've put together this handy guide to the two services so you can compare them in one place and hopefully find out if Spotify or Tidal is the best streaming service for you.
Prices and availability
Spotify and Tidal offer several different subscription levels, but only Spotify offers a free plan (although it's ad-supported and you can't listen to tracks in the order you want). The cheapest Spotify plan is Spotify Premium, which costs $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$11.99 per month, giving you unlimited access to your library of over 30 million tracks on your laptop, phone and tablet. Spotify Premium also lets you download tracks to three devices at once for offline playback. There are discounts available for students and you can even get Premium and access Headspace's Mindfulness app as part of a discount plan. Students have access to Headspace as part of their Premium plan. If there are a few people in your household who want to use Spotify, you can save money by signing up for a Spotify Premium Family Account, which allows up to six people to sign in to Spotify at a time (if you try to do so with a regular account, you'll be kicked out of the account). service as soon as another user plays a song). This tier costs €15.99 / €16.99 / AU €17.99 and requires all members to live under the same roof. Tidal offers two subscription plans, the cheapest being Tidal Premium, which costs $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$11.99, and offers streams at a 320kbps bitrate, the same audio quality as Spotify. If you're looking for Hi-Res Audio, you'll need to shell out $19.99 / £19.99 / AU$23.99 per month for Tidal HiFi. So Spotify offers cheaper subscription plans, but doesn't provide a higher level of fidelity for audiophiles like Tidal does.
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User interface
One of the reasons why Spotify is so popular is its user-friendly interface. When you open the app, you'll find a series of personalized playlists, your 'daily mixes', that have been curated by Spotify based on your listening habits, along with your top artists, top playlists, and new releases. This is something to keep in mind about Spotify; there are many playlists. It may seem intimidating, but it's a strategy that works, as its algorithms ultimately tailor the app to each user. Everything is presented in colored tiles that appear against Spotify's dark background. The tile system is small enough to make it easy to select new albums and playlists, while also lavishly grouping them into a timeline of content that is ultimately organized based on what's been on. listening and what you might want. In the desktop app and web player, there's a sidebar on the left side of the screen that lets you browse for new music releases, radio stations, as well as your library, playlists, recently read songs, and more. On the mobile app, these sections are a bit more hidden to save space, and it should be noted that the layout on the desktop and mobile platforms is a bit different. Search is very intuitive and even if you misspelled an artist name, Spotify will usually find what you're looking for.
(Image credit: TechRadar) Tidal uses a similar tile-based interface on a dark background, and you'll find curated playlists, recommended albums, and graphics on your home screen. Click on the sidebar to go to your "My Music" area, where you'll find all your saved tracks, and navigation is generally very easy. You can't search by genre, unlike Spotify, which is a shame for a platform for true music lovers. Searching isn't usually very smart: misspell an album or artist name, even by one character or punctuation, and you'll get no results. A bit of optimization here wouldn't hurt, but as long as you're careful, you won't have any problems. That being said, Tidal does have one cool feature that Spotify doesn't; Audio search is essentially a matter of integrating Shazam directly into the app. Hit the button and you'll hear any song you can capture in your environment, identify it, and let you save it to your own Tidal library.
(Image credit: Spotify)
Compatibility
You can get Spotify on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices. If you're using a laptop or desktop, Spotify is also compatible with OS X and Windows, and there's a Flash-based web player too. Support for Tidal is pretty much the same, so you can get it on devices running iOS 11 and higher, Android 5 and higher, macOS, and Windows. Both streaming platforms are also compatible with a number of add-on devices including AV receivers, TVs, and even cars.
Music Catalog and Discovery
Spotify currently has over 50 million songs, while Tidal claims to have 60 million tracks in its catalog. Spotify's strong influx of tracks helped it take off in its early days, and with an average of 40,000 tracks added each day, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The streaming giant focuses heavily on promoting new tracks and innovative artists, through curated playlists like New Music Friday, which acts as a launching pad for budding artists to hit the big time. Organized playlists are almost always the first thing you see when you load up a version of the app, and the service apparently creates playlists for just about every subgenre of music. These are also constantly updated, so your favorites never hail after long use. As we mentioned earlier, you'll also find personalized playlists to suit your listening habits, which is a great way to discover new music, as well as revisit some of your favorite tracks. However, Spotify has glaring omissions in its music catalog, largely due to artists who don't want their music available to stream anywhere or by artists who don't particularly like Spotify's royalty payments. . Vous ne trouverez pas d'artistes like Joanna Newsom et Garth Brooks sur Spotify, et jusqu'à assez récemment, vous ne pouviez même pas écouter les Beatles - même si vous trouverez toute leur discographie sur la plate-forme de streaming ces jours-ci (Thank God).
(Image credit: Tidal) Some of Spotify's absent artists have strong ties to Jay-Z and thus favor his platform, Tidal. Beyoncé's 2019 album Lemonade debuted exclusively on Tidal, for example. This means that Tidal's catalog can seem somewhat skewed towards hip-hop and rap artists, though this may be due to the platform's editorial curation of their tracks. That said, Tidal does a pretty good job of curating music playlists based on your listening habits, and you'll find that a few weeks of use will give its algorithms enough information to give you some really interesting recommendations. Along with these personalized recommendations, Tidal also displays the most popular playlists and releases from its service, along with mood-based playlists and the Tidal Rising section, which flies the flag for new talent. Both platforms also offer podcasts, though it seems Spotify is taking this area a bit more seriously, having spent more than €200 million to acquire two podcast production companies in 2019.
(Image credit: Spotify)
Audio quality
If you subscribe to Spotify Premium, you can choose from three sound quality levels: Normal, High, and Extreme. When using mobile and desktop apps, Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis. It was a semi-popular format ten years ago and Spotify continues to use it because it's open source. Spotify does not have to pay a license fee for this. On standard settings, music is streamed at 96kbps, which sounds much better than 3kbps MP129s. Switch to the high quality setting and the bitrate will go up to 160 kbps. The extreme settings use 320 kbps, which is perceptively close to lossy. Spotify doesn't offer lossless or high-res streaming, which is one reason audiophiles might want to consider another service. If you're determined to get the best audio quality possible, Tidal is your best bet. For that, you'll need a subscription to Tidal HiFi, which lets you stream lossless 16-bit FLAC and ALAC audio, though there are also thousands of TIDAL Masters files that stream in 24-bit.
(Image credit: TechRadar) Even if you choose Tidal Premium, your catalog is still available to stream at 320kbps - the same quality as Spotify's highest setting - and you may even find that Tidal tracks sound a bit richer. in this configuration. So why bother with lossless streaming? Well, Hi-Res Audio codecs are capable of reproducing the full range of sounds from recordings mastered from higher-than-CD-quality music sources—sound that faithfully reproduces the quality that musicians and engineers worked on. study. at the time...