Tidal

thought this was a really sharp piece on tidal/spotify/our brave new streaming future etc

http://www.stereogum.com/1848677/streaming-war-pigs-apple-tidal-spotify-the-year-in-music-services/franchises/2015-in-review/

Good read indeed - guy is a good writer, believe he also does the regular metal and pop columns

so many true statements in that article it's like bizarro lefsetz

did anyone else get the thing where they were incorrectly billed by Tidal and then given a refund and 3 free months as recompense? I'm wondering how widespread this was.

anyway, I guess I'll mess around with Tidal again.

Finally redeemed my trial subscription for the same reason everybody else has. What a mess. Really miserable interface, lots of errors and bugs.

on Android, I prefer the UI to Spotify. queue management in particular is a lot easier. I also haven't had any issues with streaming lately.

if the catalog caught up, I'd seriously consider dropping Spotify for Tidal, but evey week I run into things that are missing. for example, the CFCF album that came out on Friday is on Spotify and is not on Tidal. outside of the Rihanna and Kanye albums, I can't think of any gaps I've found that run the other direction.

so it goes http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/31/jay-z-tidal-owners-schibsted-verdane?CMP=share_btn_fb

Welp

I finally signed up for the free 30 day trial so I could indulge in some Prince nostalgia, and the sound quality is so much crazily better than Spotify that I don't really know what to say. I may end up keeping them both. The weird ILM anti-Tidal bias (actually it's not that weird) had kept me away until now. Kind of hoping that Jay Z will discover a love for death metal and Julianna Hatfield, join ILM, start multiple handy and helpful playlist threads that happen (for no particular reason) to be Tidal-based, and then we can all be friends.

Do you have Spotify set to the highest bitrate (320)?

Yes. I've also set my bitrate to Julianna Hatfield and Donny Darko, but it doesn't seem to be helping.

i've been using tidal since kanye and it's very easily the best streaming all imo, and i say that as a multi-year spotify subscriber

i think the celebrities behind tidal have done a terrible job of marketing it. part of it is just the problem of people like kanye and jay-z being the ones saying "give more money back to the artists"--they're right, but they are terrible poster boys for needy musicians.

But will Jay Z handle the statistical analysis for my humble village's Padgenjop [species of Swedish fish] poll in 2016? If not, I fear I must return to Spotify full-time...

It is true that famous black musicians are much worse spokespeople for a music service than anonymous white businessmen, some of whom we might be friends with.

you got me!

i mean, that's not entirely untrue? the press has an anti-artist, pro-business slant and has for a while.

i guess i don't know enough about "the press" -- that seems like a very broad generalization to make. do you mean the music press? newspapers? blogs?

Tidal really is a lot better now. I just transferred my huge 1450 track 2016 playlist from Spotify to Tidal using Soundiiz and it found 1324 of the tracks - way more than I expected. With some additional detective work I located about 50 more and the 50 or so that are left are mostly pretty obscure.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the Tidal app (which I only downloaded for Beyonce), but I'm not entirely convinced by the whole proposition yet. Now I use Sonos for most of my listening I'm not really arsed which service I use, but I've got too many Spotify playlists to give them up easily.

I'd never heard of Soundiiz before though, sounds intriguing.

What about the whole proposition rubs you the wrong way, Matt?
I miss the notifications and the ability to pick up tracks from friends' playlists and also the stats from Spotify. The sound is better though and that does mean something. As does the argument about economy.

My main objection was always that they just didn't have the stuff I was looking for though, and this seems to be changing. There's still a bit of afropop and dancehall missing but not enough that I can really complain about it anymore.

Yeah the size of the catalogue was my whole issue, also ease of playlist porting, but if this is all changing then I'm open to making a switch. There has to be a compelling reason to do so though and the only one I can think of is Spotify's dodgy search and endless spinning circles if it's not in the mood.

does that even happen on paid spotify?! i literally only ever open spotify to make playlists for other ppl and i hate every moment i'm in it bc of the spinning circles, freezes, intrusive ads on the screen etc, but i thought that was just a drawback of the free version

It happen infrequently but it's annoying when it does. The Sonos app has no such issues.

Realistically, Tidal has much better (and noticeably so) sound. Spotify has a better catalog, especially when it comes to the obscure stuff. The interfaces strike me as very similar. Tidal doesn't have a fairly high-level executive supplying playlists to ILM, which is a drawback (unless you consider being urged to listen to Baby Metal a drawback itself, in which case things get complicated). My solution at the moment was to drop Netflix and subscribe to Tidal in addition to Spotify. I might go to free Spotify in the near future.

i don't think glenn is a 'high level executive'

Who is this glenn of whom you speak? I only know one glenn (with a small g) and he runs a small mom & pop store that sells herring or something. Some random blog called Vice did an article on him a while ago, I think about whether he preferred dill or mustard on his herring?

Tidal has better sound even on the standard subscription? Because the 'hi-fi' one is a bit pricey for me

What is hi-fi Tidal, $19.99 a month? So two hours a month working at your job at McDonalds. Spotify is only one hour a month flipping burgers, and that other $9.98 is completely essential to feed your wife and children. So yeah, forget I ever brought it up, Spotify all the way. At the end of the year, you'll have an extra $120 or so, which makes a nice down-payment for a house in Bushwick. And now that I think of it, back in the 90s when I was just out of college, they actually *paid* you to take CDs home from the store.

fuck off?

Ok, but it'll cost you $9.99.

Tidal's Premium option is at $9.99 and the sound quality is superior to Spotify's. I ran a check and the difference is noticeable. It pains me to say this, because I was starting to think of Spotify as my new home. They even hava a student discount, I think. And with more obscure stuff pouring into Tidal, they're suddenly in the game again.

Spotify's UI and stats and things are still more awesome than the competition's though, so I'm not quitting it yet.

They = tidal, hava = have

To be fair, what I saw was $19.99 for Tidal Premium. Maybe they have better deals out there.

hmmm, saying Spotify's UI and stats are 'awesome' sure gives me pause on tidal. i always encounter bugs and weird quirks, especially on the mobile version. and i always thought they could have beefed up the social element, maybe incorporate a last.fm-type service within it. anyway, installing my trial tidal subscription now. i sent a calendar alert to be sure to cancel either one in a few weeks, though, because i work at mcdonald's

For the social side of things, I really think Tidal should have someone in the company posting playlists on ILM on a regular basis, so that is in fact a major mistake. I think minimum wage at McDonalds is about to go up to $15, so it gets better.

this thread sure is salty

Hi Ulysses. Are you the ILM poster who keeps the Spotify playlists updated. I sometimes have trouble keeping people's names straight.

xpost
This says 9.99: http://tidal.com/us/try-now

And I'm not saying Spotify is perfect, I get weird offline messages on my phone too, and the notifications only work at times, but the simple ways you can access other users' playlists to keep up to date, easily recommend stuff to others and also the very useful new releases things that glenn and others are doing make it a must have for me.

So just to keep things honest, $9.99 isn't for the hi-fi version. It's $19.99 for that.

xp I am the ILX poster who keeps the Spotify playlists updated. It's an immensely dumb enterprise but it's helpful for me to hear more music.

We're lucky to have people like you and glenn keeping our Spotify playlists updated!

Yes the hifi option is more expensive but I'm saying that unless you actually NEED the hifi version the premium version is the same price as the competitors and has better sound than them. Is that hard to understand or are you just trying to pick a fight?

I think you should probably reread this thread from where I came in. Shorter answer=no.

xp you're welcome dlp9001, though glenn doesn't have anything to do with that project.

I'm also unconvinced that it's a good idea to move everything over to a service that's quite likely to fold when its celebrity backers decide they've burned quite enough cash on it.

It's not gonna fold, I think. If anything it'll get bought and swallowed up by a bigger company who are interested in retaining the hifi subscribers with $20 a month to spend.

Depends on how many there are.

I think there's definitely a market for hifi streaming - the world is full of people with high end stereos and streaming isn't going to go away. The big question has always been how you market it and Tidal hasn't quite cracked that one yet?