TIDAL Is Actually Just Better Than Spotify
There’s a whole slew of reasons people recently might be looking to switch away from Spotify. Whether its the Joe Rogan controversy (which has multiple subplots in and of itself such as covid misinformation to repeatedly using the n word across dozens of shows), the fact that they pay nearly nothing to artists, or that they bury musicians with Apple Music deals, you’re maybe reading this looking to switch off Spotify.
But, that’s not what I’m writing about since let’s face it: people will choose convenience and price over just about everything. So, rather than give you my unabashed opinion on the morality of those issues which has been written about 1,000s of times already, I wanted to give you all my 2c on TIDAL as a service purely from a feature stand point.
Music Selection
I want to clear this one out of the way up front since it’s probably the most important to anyone who isn’t listening to Billboard 100 artists exclusively. TIDAL and Spotify have a very close number of tracks. TIDAL claims “over 80 million” while Spotify claims “over 82 million”. In other words, they have roughly 97.5% of the same offering.
I tested this myself and used a tool called TuneMyMusic to import my artists. Out of the 245 saved artists I had on Spotify only 6 didn’t make it which is exactly 97.5% of my own library as well. The artists not there were a metal band that had dogs as a singers and some obscure metal and punk bands that hadn’t released music in decades and one Japanese music group.
While I’d love if it had a 1:1 match with Spotify the difference is quite slim and not impactful day to day for me. For those few missing when I do want to listen to them they’re on Spotify for free or YouTube.
Quality
TIDAL is a clear winner with quality. That’s basically their main schtick. I don’t want to dive into it too far since there’s countless materials on it but the gist is TIDAL spends a lot of time getting the highest quality versions of songs. They have studio quality from master files from artists that are about as high quality as you can go and CD quality for any they don’t have. They also support 360 Reality Audio.
Blocking
One of the features I love in TIDAL that I requested with Spotify support a couple times is blocking artists. This can be because you just hate their music and it pops up often or you disagree with their beliefs and don’t want to support them or maybe a bit of both, either way, TIDAL supports blocking of tracks, videos, and artists.
With Spotify there’s some artists that would constantly come into my Discover Weekly or Release Radar no matter how many times I said I didn’t like the artist and used the “hide” feature. I reported this as an issue too. Also, there’s artists I don’t like that are popular that would be in “By Spotify” genre playlists that I always skipped. TIDAL I just block and never have to hear from it again.
Paying Artists You Like
Something that makes me feel good using TIDAL and I also just like to see is the fact that 10% of my subscription goes to my top artists. Not only do they get the streaming royalties but then a bonus for being a favorite of mine.
In general, TIDAL really seems to go above and beyond to make it a platform for artists. They call out all the credits clearly and you can dig into, say, “all songs where this artist was the composer” or “where this artist was the songwriter” or producer and more. As someone who really loves music I really enjoy getting to know more of the “behind the scenes” people just as much as the people “on stage”.
Videos
TIDAL in many ways seems to be like the Netflix of music. They started with licensing music for streaming but they’ve been moving into original content. They have an entire Videos section with not only music videos but actual movies and shows. Additionally they have “album experiences” where they the artist commentary as a video about tracks or their albums and then play the music.
Get TIDAL
So my opinion: switch to TIDAL. Do I think as a company they are just better people? Sure. Even if you completely agree with Spotify’s politics TIDAL is just an overall better music streaming platform.
Disclaimer: I don’t know anyone at TIDAL or Spotify, not being paid by TIDAL, and am in no way at all affiliated with TIDAL.
