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Raquel asked: “I’ve been hearing things about Apple Music and now Tidal. I’ve been using Spotify. Are they worth changing over to, and if so, why?”
Frankly it’s probably not worth the effort of rebuilding your playlists at this point.
If you have any Apple device, Apple Music is handy in that it integrates with Siri, and if you want to try it, why not? it’s free for the first three months, so by all means, give it a try. They have a very, very large catalogue and they have support from a huge number of artists, many of whom even guest host their own shows on Apple’s Beats 1 radio station.
If you want to try [Apple Music], why not? it’s free for the first three months.
Tidal is a different story… it was launched in 2014 by a company named Aspiro, last March it was purchased by Jay-Z in what frankly looks like a “me too!” move to own a streaming music service like the one that made Dr. Dre a billionaire. Tidal is not Beats Music though, ask your friends and see how many of them know it even exists. Tidal is not really catching on, it went from being on the top 20 list of the Apple Store charts to so low you’d have to work to find it on the list at all.
It’s not cheap either, their website is titled “Tidal: High Fidelity Music Streaming,” but the “HiFi plan” will cost you $20/month… When your streaming plan makes Apple’s look cheap, you have a problem.
They do have lower fidelity plan they call “premium”
They do have lower fidelity plan they call “premium” which does stream at the same bitrate as Spotify and costs the same money (assuming you’re even paying for Spotify, since you don’t have to), but why leave Spotify to get at best the same deal? You’d have to start rebuilding your library to get nothing more than what you already had.
Jay-Z had also been having some issues paying Sony for the licensing fees they agreed upon, so there was talking about Tidal maybe losing one of the big three labels, but at least for now they’re all in and Sony doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
That means that you can expect a good library of songs, and you can expect Jay-Z’s wife Beyonce, a Sony artist, to be a part of that library too.
Tidal does offer a 30 day free trial, so you can give them and Apple Music a shot and see how they compare with Spotify for you, it won’t cost you anything.