Tidal vs Spotify: Although Tidal has been delivering creative and strategically dependable services in the music streaming industry for years, the service has been flowing under the surface and, perhaps, off the radar for a long. Being incapable of drawing new subscribers, Tidal should not be considered as a capable music streaming service when comparing it with Spotify.
Though everyone knows, Spotify is the world’s most immeasurable music streaming service, how could Tidal be competing against it? Yet, there is a single point in common among both of those music streaming providers. Both of them offer lossless music. Perhaps, the only lossless music streaming service provider in the industry. However, in any instance, if you would like to convert a playlist from Spotify to Tidal or vice versa, MusConv could be highly efficient in converting all of your songs and playlists at the blink of a cursor.
Let us look at the services of the Tidal at first. Tidal would charge you double in contrast to the pricing of Spotify. Tidal provides lossless music at $19.99 when Spotify pricing begins at $9.99. However, here are the highlights of the top offering of Tidal.
Tidal vs Spotify: Difference
Tidal: Pricing, Tracks, and Features
Cost: $9.99 or $19.99 for the premium tier
The celebrity’s choice. Tidal has a superstar roster of supporters/shareholders and one mega-star with his finger on the button – Jay Z. It’s not Jay-Z’s creation, though. Tidal was the brain-child of tech company Aspiro, which Jay-Z’s company acquired earlier this year. What generated so many column inches for Tidal – aside from the bizarre star-studded launch event – was its promise of lossless audio and HD music videos. Here’s how it all breaks down:
Tidal costs $9.99 a month for the standard service and $19.99 for the ‘premium’ service. What’s the difference? Tidal’s high-fidelity sound is only available on the premium tier; this means that for $19.99, you’ll be able to listen to CD quality music using the Free Lossless Audio Codec or ‘FLAC.’ If you’re listening on a smartphone, you’ll need a device with decent digital-to-analog conversion or ‘DAC.’
Most of the latest top-end handsets have decent DAC and support 24-bit/192kHz music playback. You’ll also need a good pair of headphones. Tidal presently has over 30 million tracks on its books, around the same as Spotify and Apple Music. But, crucially, some big-name artists – Like Taylor Swift – are removing their music from Spotify in protest over the ‘freemium’ tier, which allows users to listen to music for free, provided they also listen to intermittent adverts. Forty-five millions of Spotify’s 60 million users stream for free. Tidal, which pays artists a larger share for their work, has attracted Swift’s likes (and many others) and has no free tier.
Extra Information
Because Tidal supports significant recording artists, there’s likely to be a temporary exclusive here and there. When it was re-launched under Jay-Z’s control earlier this year, music from Rihanna and a video from Beyonce and Nicki Minaj made-up some of the exclusive content. Alongside some exclusively curated playlists by artists. Since then, however, only content has been a bit scarce.
Spotify: Pricing, Tracks, and Features
Cost: free, $4.99 and $10
Spotify is a veteran of the music streaming industry, having poured its first track back in 2008. Now, it has over 60 million users, with 15 million paying subscribers. It’s merely the largest and most well-known music streaming service around. Here’s how it breaks down:
Spotify has three tiers; free, family, and premium. The open deck speaks for itself, its ‘free’ in the sense that there’s no upfront cost, but you’ll *pay* by listening to intermittent adverts if you access it on a mobile or tablet. However, on mobile, you can only listen to pre-curated playlists, skip six tracks per hour, and you can’t listen to anything on-demand or offline. Tablet and desktop users have the same limitations, but can listen to music on-demand and edit playlists.
The premium and family tiers give users full access to all of Spotify’s functions. The only difference is that family members of a premium tier subscriber get a 50% discount. There’s also a 10% student discount available. Spotify has over 30 million tracks on its books, with over 1.5-billion playlists built since it began. A figure which reflects its market-leading position and a vast number of users.
Since Tidal re-launched, there’s been a growing fear that major artists will jump ship and remove their work from Spotify – so far, only Taylor Swift (entire back catalog) and Jay Z (1996 ‘Reasonable Doubt’ album) have done so. There’s unlikely to be a mass exodus from Spotify by artists because most are under record contracts, and therefore don’t own the master recordings or the rights that come with them.
Extra Information
What Spotify lacks in exclusive content the likes of Tidal offers, it makes up for in features/gimmicks (you decide). Including new stuff like Spotify Running – which matches music to your exercise pace – videos, viewing lyrics as a track plays. And Spotify Touch, which lets users preview 30 seconds away by merely long-pressing it. There’s also access to podcasts and thousands of in-house and user-created playlists. Premium users can also enjoy Spotify Connect. Which allows you to play music through multiple Bluetooth-connected speakers via the app.