By now I’m sure you’ve all heard about Tidal and have seen one of the million clips various musicians have posted to their Instagram accounts. If you haven’t check one out below.
The app itself has been around for a little while now, but it was thrust into the spotlight when Jay-Z (and wife, Beyonce) invested a decent amount into it. It’s another music streaming app, but one that musicians and artists can get behind because they’re actually going to get paid for the songs of theirs that are streamed. Now I’m not saying that Spotify and Pandora don’t pay the artists, they do it’s just pennies on the dollar. Plus an artist would need something like a million streams on Pandora to even get a check cut (ie: Pharrell earning less than $3,000 for over 43 MILLION streams of “Happy” on Pandora).
Well Tidal is supposed to change all of that. Artists will get a bigger slice of the pie and in return the users will pay a little bit more for a better quality of streaming and exclusive content. Now you guys know I love Spotify. I’ve mentioned it on here a quite often and have been using it since 2012. I even pay for Premium so that I can listen to my playlists offline (which is a big help at work since I have to do that when I’m hard-lined into our network). I pay the student rate which is only $5 a month and that’s $5 well spent in my opinion. Tidal has two subscription levels, the basic one for $10/month and the HiFi for $20/month. I chose to use my 30 day trial to test out the HiFi option and I must say that I’m impressed! The sound quality is amazing!! I could hear everything so much clearer, even in the shitty Apple earbuds that came with my phone.
Come on, y’all knew I had to mention something on my social media accounts. I decided to test it out on Justin Timberlake’s ’20/20 Experience’ album and I wasn’t disappointed.
The sound quality alone is tempting me to switch over to Tidal once this month trial is finished but I’m going to have to play around with it more. I have years of playlists on Spotify and I’m so used to the app and desktop player. I’ll definitely keep you guys posted and encourage you to at least try the 30 day trial of Tidal, preferably HiFi if you haven’t already.
