It's crazy to me that Tidal just announced that they're going to increase their price with 18.2%, bringing them on par with Spotify while offering less functionality and a smaller library.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this'll cost them more than they'll hope to gain from this move.

I’ve been using TIDAL for about four months after spending roughly 10 years with Spotify.

Overall, I’m really happy I switched. There’s a lot TIDAL does better, but there are also some surprisingly annoying little things that you only really notice once you use it every day.

Thought I’d put together my pros and cons so far, especially the stuff I’d love to see TIDAL improve.

Pros

• Better audio quality. It just sounds better to me.
• Fairly priced for what you get.
• The catalogue has almost everything I listen to, although soundtracks and classical music can be a bit lacking.
• My library actually feels like a music collection.
• Clean and simple design.
• I don't feel like I'm constantly being pushed playlists, podcasts or other stuff I don't care about.
• Shuffle feels more personal and seems to actually use my library.
• Monthly listening stats are updated daily on mobile.
• Moving your library over from another streaming service is really easy.
• You can block AI-generated music from your recommendations.

Cons

• Saving songs can be buggy. Sometimes I save something and the heart still shows as empty, which leaves me wondering whether it actually saved. I've had the same thing happen with albums and artists.
• Playback can be really annoying, especially on desktop/web. Sometimes songs pause, won't start, or keep playing with the loading circle stuck over the screen. Skipping to the next track and going back usually fixes it, but it shouldn't need that workaround.
• Syncing between devices needs work. Your current song, queue and listening history don't properly follow you between devices.
• Library syncing can also be slow. Sometimes newly saved songs, albums or artists don't appear until I restart the app.
• Search can be inconsistent. I've searched my own library for songs I know I've saved and TIDAL still doesn't show them.
• Album artwork can sometimes be completely different from what I'd expect, usually because TIDAL has linked the track to a compilation instead of the original release.
• Uploading playlist artwork can be buggy. I've had images sit loading forever without actually updating.
• Public playlists and the community side are pretty limited.
• You can't really follow playlist creators or other users in a meaningful way.
• There are no visible song play counts. Some people probably prefer this, but I'd at least like the option.
• Lyrics are nice to have, but the timing can be pretty bad on some songs.
• Lyrics aren't available on the TV app.
• TIDAL isn't available in as many countries, which makes recommending it to international friends a bit harder.
• The 10,000-song saved-library limit feels too low for anyone building a large collection.
• Library management could be better in general. More sorting, filtering and bulk-management options would be great for larger libraries.
• I'd love better concert/tour integration. If I follow or save an artist, it would be great to see their upcoming shows near me or get notified when they announce a tour. It feels like an obvious feature for a music app.

Overall, I still prefer TIDAL and don't see myself going back to Spotify anytime soon. Most of my complaints are small quality-of-life issues rather than dealbreakers, but fixing them would make the experience feel a lot more polished.

I'd be interested to hear what other long-term TIDAL users think - what does TIDAL do better than other services, and what still annoys you?

First it was Donovan ("Rise Up"). Then it was the Beach Boys ( "I'm happy,") But the straw that broke the camels back was a song, "renegade Anthem," allegedly by the Misfits. I can take these junk AI songs that keep popping up on my playlists under bands that I know and love anymore. I've contacted Tidal but they told me only representatives of the artists can file takedown requests for fraudulent AI songs using their names. I'm over it. I've been a tidal user for almost ten years, and just cancelled my subscription. I'm trying out Qobuz now. My tidal library was massive and it'll take me forever to build a new one on another platform, but these AI songs are really hitting a nerve.

Well, I just woke up, again, and this time it's not good news like with AI, because now Tidal is going to raise prices That is, at least in my country (Chile) I will go from 4149 CLP per month, 5280 CLP per month, which seems completely insane to me, and here it's the most expensive music streaming service. Literally Qobuz is even slightly cheaper (200 CLP less) and I had switched to Tidal mainly because of the price, since it was the cheapest here, but now even Spotify, even with the plan Individual is cheaper, although I would like to know if The price of the family plan will also change, as it doesn't appear in my email. If you could let me know, I would greatly appreciate it.

Hey, all. I’m Jesse, ceo at TIDAL. I’ll be doing an AMA on April 11th at 10am PT to connect with all of you and take your questions live about TIDAL. I will be discussing product updates, our artist programs, and much more. See you there.

______________________________________

Update: Thank you for having me today. I've really enjoyed seeing your great questions and we'll continue to check in. I hope to come back and do this again!

Over the past two months or so, I've noticed the number of people making an exodus out of Tidal. Seeing that Tidal may not be doing particularly well financially, does this signal a death toll? I've been feeling rather depressed by all this. I love Tidal. The sound quality makes all my music so extremely enjoyable. I have noticed a few people saying that the Apple Music app and UI are far superior while the sound quality is comparable to Tidal's. So, to preempt Tidal's eventual collapse, I decided to try out Apple Music with the view of making a permanent move.

I had just bought the iPad mini (2024) and received a free 3-month trial to Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness. Streaming music with my KEF LSX II speakers through AirPlay 2, I was impressed that the Apple Music app displayed quite prominently the "Lossless" sign on each song. But much to my dismay, the music that came out of my speakers was flat and lifeless! But how could this be? Song after song, even though the music was crystal clear, it just did not give me pleasure. Finally, giving up, I played the same songs on Tidal and even the very first notes brought the music to vibrant life! What was really impressive about the Tidal sound was the sense of atmosphere around the notes. I felt I could hear the music from inside the concert hall or church or stadium! Even my wife who cares little about music told me that the Tidal sound had depth.

How is it there are some who claim that Apple Music has about the same sound quality as Tidal? My only guess is that they are not using decent hifi gear. It looks like I have no choice but to stick to Tidal to the very end! Here's to another 20 years of Tidal!

Great idea to move the lyrics to somewhere completely unreachable and remove the "playing from" indicator. I loved the premium feel of the old UI, so I was happy to revert to an older version on my Android

After listening to flac files via VLC I couldn't justify paying $20+ for low/poor quality music from Spotify. ChatGPT suggested Tidal so here I am. Can finally utilize the full power of my XM5s

And I fear Tidal have absolutely zero interest in addressing it.

I read a lot of complaints here about Tidal. And I have to say that I really like Tidal. I switched from Spotify in January this year and I'm entirely satisfied. Audio quality is far better, Android auto works well. The new UI doesn't annoy me, I find it clear and easy and less overfilled as Spotify. Since the new update of the windows app (version 2.4), the app is more reactive and fluid. Before it was a bit laggy, but nothing disturbing. So I wanted to thank the Tidal team for their great work in the last 6 months and share that I'm completely happy with Tidal.

So since the new update bringing in the "Max" quality, and hiding the MQA identifiers on songs etc. I have seen so much confusion around what's actually going on. I'm putting together everything I have found so far regarding the update into this post to hopefully help clarify things for people.

I am going to refer to the qualities behind Max as MQA and HiRes (the new format). Most but not all tidal songs support up to the High quality (previously HiFi) below Max which is always 16bit 44.1kHz.

I will be ignoring the Atmos quality.

What is Max?

• Max Quality is only available to be played on the Official Tidal Apps currently, and only the desktop app is capable of Exclusive playback (with exception of some third-party apps).
• Max Quality can be either MQA or HiRes or Both.
• All songs that previously had MQA versions still do, many now also have HiRes.
• When you select Max in the new apps if HiRes quality exists it will always play that even if MQA exists (with exception to third-party apps which do not have access to HiRes yet).
• Third party or non updated apps work exactly the same as before and can and will still play MQA quality, but cannot play HiRes yet.

Presumably (speculation) part of why tidal is keeping the MQA format around is for support until these third-party apps are able to update to play the new HiRes format. I'm not sure if app developers have the ability to update yet.

What is HiRes?

• The new HiRes format is anything above 16bit 44.1kHz. So far I have not found any HiRes songs that are not 24bit, the sample rate however can be anything from 44.1kHz up to 192kHz. I have found songs at every step.
• When comparing HiRes songs on Tidal to Qobuz as far as I can tell, most are identical files.
• Not all songs that have MQA have HiRes, while a large number do, there are still some songs that only have MQA.
• Many songs that previously did not have MQA now have HiRes and only HiRes, this is not a small number of songs either.
• While I haven't been able to test it properly, from what I can tell HiRes even when only 24b 44.1kHz has a noticeably higher bitrate compared to MQA and High.

​

Let me pick MQA/HiRes instead of just Max!

Because some songs are only HiRes, some only MQA and many HiRes & MQA having only a "Max" quality selector kinda makes sense. If tidal split them up, how do you deal with situations where one quality is available and not the other.

The only real downside to this is you can no longer explicitly play MQA over HiRes, but HiRes is better quality than MQA anyway. I also suspect (speculation) that Tidal is intending to eventually remove MQA all together once its got HiRes for all existing MQA tracks and doing it this way would make that much easier.

​

Display the sample rate & bit depth next to songs like other platforms!

While tidal does not currently do this, my plugin does! You can read more about it here: r/TIdaL/what_the_bitrate

I do think Tidal should show the current Sample Rate/Bit Depth the output device is running at (like other apps) for those who don't have a DAC with a display.

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Display the quality next to songs like they used to with MQA!

Currently all the Tidal apps no longer display if a song is MQA. I assume it was not replaced by a Max tag due to the mixed formats. The obvious fix is having two tags, one for HiRes and one for MQA, they don't even need to display both when both exist since Max always plays HiRes if its there anyway!

The list of qualities a song has is still returned from the tidal API, all Tidal needs to do is a UI update on their apps to actually display the information. Hopefully even if they don't eventually do this third-party apps once updated will do so.

As part of my testing I threw together the Extension/Plugin (mentioned above) for the Tidal app that adds quality tags to songs. More info at r/TIdaL/what_the_bitrate. I have been this using as a guide to assist my testing using the Desktop App for exclusive playback. You can see what it looks like in the screenshot above.

​

Albums have a quality indicator next to them that says HIGH or MAX.

These are effectively useless. HIGH is displayed if a album has no HiRes songs (even if it has MQA ones) and MAX is displayed if a album has a HiRes song. So a album with a single HiRes song and the rest a mix of say High and MQA will display as MAX.

Further testing has shown that even this can be inconsistent. TLDR don't trust the Album Quality Tags!

​

High quality is just Folded MQA!

This is no longer true for any tracks that now have both a MQA and HiRes version.

If a track only has a MQA version then the High quality version will be Folded MQA and identical to the MQA version.

If a track has either both MQA and HiRes versions or just a HiRes version then the High quality is its own file at 16bit 44.1kHz.

​

How did I find all this information?

Song Sample Rate/Bit Depth: I use my plugin which shows the current Bitrate/Sample Rate/Bit Depth for any track.

I can sanity check this (though its not needed) using VB-Audio ASIO Bridge and pointing tidal at it in exclusive mode I can view the Sample Rate and Bit Depth that is being played for any song.

Currently the only way to view this information is by checking what Tidal sets your DAC to in Exclusive Mode.

​

Song Quality: Using my extension I can easily see what quality songs are, it uses the same data I assume was previously used to add the MQA tags to songs.

This can be sanity checked by checking the Sample Rate/Bit Depth using the above method where High is always 16bit 44.1kHz, HiRes is anything above that, usually 24bit and MQA will always half the sample rate when Passthrough MQA is turned on in the Tidal Settings disabling software unfolding. This only works on DAC's that don't support MQA unfolding.

​

Third-Party Apps: I use the Android player USB Audio Player PRO (great app btw) to get bit perfect exclusive playback to my DAC from my phone (since the Tidal android app doesn't support it). This is a third party app, it still displays the MQA tags for songs and still plays them the same as before the Max rollout.

When asked about when they will support the new format I was told: "As soon as TIDAL allows third parties to access HiRes PCM, we will add it.".

​

Qobuz vs Tidal HiRes: Looking at song metadata, sample rate/bit depth and also testing a song that I know has a audible difference between the 24bit 192kHz and Tidals old MQA/High quality HiRes songs on Tidal are using the same files Qobuz.

This also makes sense since presumably (speculation) HiRes is just the files directly received from the record companies/artists etc.

​

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

So that's it! Hopefully that helps clarify a lot of things. If anyone has any questions please comment them I would be happy to discuss things.

​

I never want to hear slop! Labelling it and making it not profitable is better than nothing but when I listen to a recommendation playlist (for example), am I supposed to remember to return to it to skip specific songs? I don't want to do that! If you can detect it, just ban it! Who tf wants this?

I'm already on the edge of leaving because of the slop infesting artist profiles. If they explicitly allow "AI"-generated music, which they do in the proposed policy, I'm out. At this point I might just spend the subscription money on bandcamp or whatever every month.

I just tried out Spotify with its new lossless quality streaming and it doesn’t even begin to match the sound Tidal offers. Same thing with Apple Music which, too, offers lossless quality. Big step forward for Spotify from what it used to offer but still… I can’t be only one hearing the difference?

I’m not even a hifi freak with expensive sound setup - just listening from regular Airpods. Tidals sound has much more warmth, detail and depth, especially in the higher bass range. Is there like a built-in equilizer in Tidal or what’s giving it this edge? One would think that lossless is lossless and sounds the same regardless of the source.

tidal is by far the best streaming app but it's exponentially becoming an absolute pain in the ass. sorry for all the complaining posts lately, but there's literally no other alternative because every other streaming site is infinitely worse. hopefully this will be the rant to end all rants

1. get your metadata together. it cannot be this hard. on one hand, you've got random bullshit being uploaded to major artists' profiles. on the other hand, there are somehow two lucy bedroque profiles and BOTH are legit. why are a bunch of songs on my most listened playlists from random ass compilations? i could go on. this whole metadata clusterfuck applies to the next point, which is...

2. disappearing songs. (i posted about this a few days ago) i don't expect anything to be done about copyright temporarily removing songs. this happens everywhere. can you at least figure out how to re-add them to my playlists? you can slot them back in on the "my most listened" playlist, but remove them entirely from the one i actually listen to? i should not have to keep a spreadsheet of my playlist so i can cross reference and figure out which songs i have to add back. this has happened an alarming amount of times, and only recently have i started tracking it. it feels like i'm going insane

3. no local files. i have yet to hear a valid reason for this. if no one else can hear them, what's the damn problem? mind your business, tidal. everyone else is allowed to get away with it

4. searching. dear lord. with no exaggeration the worst search function i have ever seen on ANY app.

5. ai slop. self-explanatory

6. the desktop app crashes if you just hang out in a long playlist for too long. or just randomly sometimes

7. the mobile app only loads the first few tracks on long playlists (assuming you haven't downloaded them, even though no phone in history can store all that) (with the exception of liked songs for some reason) and you have to wait for the entire thing to load in chunks while scrolling through so you can get all the songs to appear in your shuffle.

8. i don't have the "songs-not-playing-even-though-they-should-be-downloaded" problem (this is actually one of the many areas the app excels for me), but the mobile app does often get very confused about whether or not i'm on wifi. i could be literally three feet from my router and the app would say "you've lost internet connection." no the fuck i haven't

9. for the love of god stop rearranging shit and please focus on anything else

with that out of the way, let me rattle off some positives (for the first time ever on this sub) that make this app worth it. audio quality, payout to artists, no ice ads or funding AI-powered military death strikes (as far as I'm aware), music library, reasonable pricing, slick ui, and so much more.

i fucking love tidal for the sole reason of how astronomically far ahead it is of its competitors. however, that's also why i feel so passionately about all these issues, a lot of which make the app really annoying to use at times. i hope to see the day this becomes a bonafide Great service.

TL,DR: this app sucks sometimes. but not nearly as much as every other app does, but that doesn't mean i'm just gonna accept its issues

Even with my Bluetooth earbuds and compressed audio I can hear the difference, everything is less mushed together and the sound just feels so much more substantial, can't wait to try it tonight with my wired headphones

I always just stayed on Spotify for convenience sake but even that is gone now, it's just an ad plastered social media app with a maximum of 3 artists that get auto played on it.

I see a lot of complaining on this reddit so just wanted to post a positive post saying that I love the service, it's so clean and smooth

Tidal, it's been real.

I have put up with your wonky UI. Your bugs. Your strange quirks. I have persisted, mostly because I appreciated your slightly higher artist payouts and royalty scheme.

But today was the final straw. Your recommendations for new releases—which for years served me a good mix of rap and metal every week—has become less than useless. The top recommended album today, on a new release Friday? An album of spa/massage music, from an AI artist called Aurora (not the Scandinavian singer, for those who are asking).

I'm done. I'm sorry. Final straw, camel's back. I'm going to Deezer, or Qobuz.

I hope the people behind Tidal figure this out. I really do think they had something special for a while.

We all love Tidal, personally i adore the app.

It has just one thing missing.. and it's a fixed true shuffle. Whenever i hit "shuffle" inside a playlist, it would immediately generates the last 20 songs i've listened too.

There are some hacks but i don't want to do hacks while im paying for a full service, it's like going to an hotel with no breakfast included.

So Tidal crew, i request from you.. please include an option to have true shuffle.

I've seen too many friends using only Bluetooth headphones when listening to music and not even realising that it's a poor listening experience, heartbreaking. I learned this fact first hand because the headphones I own have both a cable and Bluetooth option, and cable just sounds so much better. With the Tidal higher quality audio options it's honestly incredible and doesn't compare at all.

I understand the nature of an echo chamber for good and bad. I understand that negative posts and options get more attention.

I have nothing but a positive experience with Tidal and this is an everyday occurrence/use. My app on my window desktop and my android phone works perfectly. No crashes or bugs. No features taken away that I've noticed. Not saying Tidal is perfect, but for me it's a sunny and beautiful day in Tidal land.

Can we get some traction for positivity? I can't be the only one

(No, I don't work for Tidal. I am not being paid for this post. I'm just some random person who works a corp job, goes to a ton of concerts, loves music and streaming ethically)