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Tidal: Audio performanceįirst of all, let’s accept that it’s fair enough to get what you’re given if you’re using Spotify for free. And starting this year, your most-streamed artists will be paid based on your streaming habits. If you’re a subscriber to Tidal HiFi Plus, you at least can take comfort in the knowledge that almost 10% of your subscription is shared between the artists you listen to the most. It’s probably more easily expressed as “give most of the money to Ed and Taylor’. Instead, it calculates a ‘stream share’ by totalling up the number of streams per month and estimates the proportion of those that were for a particular artist or song. Spotify doesn’t pay a set amount per stream of each individual song. Given that one of the founding principles of Tidal is to offer a (slightly) more reasonable deal to the artists whose music it features, you won’t be staggered to learn it has the better of Spotify where this sort of thing is concerned. Pay more and genuinely high-resolution audio is on the menu, as well as spatial audio mixes.īasically, if you’re willing to spend, spend on Tidal. Pay the same amount as you’ll pay for Spotify and the music you have access to is far less compressed. But once you start talking about paying for these streaming services, Tidal makes a very compelling case for itself. Given that Spotify can be yours for free, it’s hard to suggest it’s anything other than good value.

In truth, Tidal has copped a lot from Spotify’s design and interface - but it’s no less usable and effective for that. Really, the biggest differences here are aesthetic. Legible fonts and logical navigation? Check and check again. They can trip themselves up, though - it seems unlikely I’ll ever forget the time Spotify recommended Nat King Cole to me on the basis I enjoyed listening to Patti Smith. Most of the time they’re both pretty successful, and not as predictable as you might imagine. They’ll also both recommend artists you may not have listened to. Both Spotify and Tidal will present the user with personalized playlists, based on listening history and algorithmic jiggery-pokery. There’s not a huge amount of difference here. Tidal has a very similar feature now, called - can you guess? - ‘Tidal Connect’. But the advantage it held for quite a while with ‘Spotify Connect‘, which allows paying customers to stream directly to systems on a common network, has lately been removed. Tidal has to make do with integration into Apple CarPlay. Spotify’s ‘Car Thing’ (a little touchscreen device to enable safe and stable streaming while you’re driving) is a nice point of difference. And naturally enough both Spotify and Tidal support Google Chromecast and Apple AirPlay. It’s available on iOS too, and can be integrated into your Sonos system.

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Tidal can be accessed via quite a few televisions, too - it’s pretty much a fixture on the Android TV interface.

Its app also shows up on any number of smart TV interfaces. Spotify is available on the most recent Sony and Microsoft games consoles, for example, and can be accessed on quite a few smartwatches and other connected wearables too. Obviously both services have been working on making themselves available on as wide a variety of platforms as possible. Spotify has been promising a ‘HiFi’ tier of its own for quite a while now - but details (of the launch date, of the number of titles that will be available, and of exactly what ‘HiFi’ means in this context) remain sketchy in the extreme. ‘Tidal Masters’ use MQA technology to stream at a giddy 9216kbps.

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A top-of-the-shop ‘HiFi Plus’ subscription, meanwhile, buys access to some music mastered in Sony 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos spatial audio, plus access to millions of truly high-resolution audio titles. Tidal, by way of contrast, streams at a CD-quality 1411kbps on its ‘HiFi’ tier.

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If you’re paying for Spotify, rather than using the free tier, everything comes across at 320kbps. Spotify’s streams run at three compression rates: a frankly miserly 96kbps, 160kbps and 320kbps. Here’s where the most significant differences between Spotify and Tidal can be found. Unless you’ve particularly catholic tastes (I am still waiting for Ginger Thompson’s glorious Boy Watcher to show up on either service), you’ll be able to find the content you’re after on either Spotify or Tidal. When you’re talking about numbers of this size, it’s obvious there’s a massive amount of overlap between the two libraries - the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell notwithstanding.

Spotify music bar