I'm all for lossless music at sufficient sample rate and bit depth but MQA is pretty much a scam that uses lossy compression and only comes with disadvantages over PCM.
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Apple Music Rival Tidal Reportedly Facing Money Problems Amid 'Stalled' User Growth
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That is exactly what Google would do, if they were to buy Soundcloud or Tidal, maybe rebrand it with a different name and make it more confusing for us all as to which one to use.
Tidal's only defining feature is the high quality streaming, but honestly, it makes no difference with my setup. A good 98% of potential customers probably feel the same.
So, a bunch of people signed up for trials to listen to a particular album and now they’re remembering to cancel their subscriptions?
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Soundcloud makes the most sense for them.
I've been a TIDAL Hi-Fi subscriber for a couple years and I love it. I use the desktop app at home and work. I rarely use my phone for music. Of course all these streaming services could burn-out as a '10s fad and I'd still have my permanent CD, vinyl and lossless download collection. I'm so glad I didn't invest a lot of time, money and effort with MP3s.
Beats headphones hooked up to anything will sound poor.
Well, I will say that getting PCM streamed at this day and age is going to be really difficult. I will take FLAC over what we have now. I wasn't aware that MQA was lossy. I am now...if we are to believe the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated and now I see where I got confused. I see that MQA can be contained in a FLAC file as well. I really don't like lossy compression and am surprised that I didn't hear it at first. Maybe because of the marketing? It does sound better than the 320kbps to me...
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I think your post highlights some of Tidal's problems. The basic subscription for Tidal is the same price as Apple Music and Spotify: 9.99. I believe Tidal started life as a lossless-only, higher end option. Even post-Jay Z, I believe it still had the 19.99 lossless tier only for a period. Not sure when they rolled out the 9.99 lossy tier, but it's been around for a least a year or two.
Tidal needs a new marketing team. The impression that this is a more expensive service is pervasive, as demonstrated by several posters in this thread. Tidal marketing has done very little to give the impression that this service is on a par pricing-wise with Spotify and Apple Music. Most of the ads I've seen underscore the "exclusive" and "premium" nature of the service. That may work for fragrances, cologne, and champagne, but I doubt that it's going to work for something as pedestrian and utilitarian as a music streaming service. Tidal may have made a strategic decision to orient their marketing to attract the 19.99-level subscribers, at the expense of attracting 9.99-level subscribers, but, from the peanut gallery, that doesn't seem like a sustainable plan—and the financials are showing it.
I've only ever used Tidal once and that was just to buy a song because they were the only ones with a lossless version of it. I found it very strange that they refuse to let one download anything with Safari, yet other services like 7digital have no problem with it.
Totally agree! Let’s hope Apple doesn’t they will just screw it up. The problem is most people have no idea how good Tidal is with their free ear buds. It takes a good system or head phones to appreciate the difference. It’s just there are not many of us that have the means to play lossless well. Then you get to MQA and that’s a tiny subset of the first group. Personally I would pay twice what I do to continue but most would not
Can I say that I enjoy owning my music and feel that eventually we will see that this whole subscription based entity that has arose from nowhere is a waste of money. Currently I pay $4.99 for Apple Music as I am in education, I pay $9.99 for iCloud storage, $24.99 for iTunes Match (still seeing if I need to keep this service or not) and then a few other services. So every month I pay an Apple tax of $14.98. I don’t own the music I get from Apple Music and don’t appreciate the artist as much as when I pay $1.29 a song. I think I’m rambling but hope you get my point. We don’t own anything any more we are technically renting it.
And there is nothing wrong with that. I prefer the diversity of being able to listen to anything I want for my $9.99/mo on Spotify. My daughter sucks Google Music dry each month for her portion of the $14.99/mo family plan. What we listen to 50 times this month, we may be tired of next month or next year. I don't want to own it.
I remember back in the old days, you bought an album or CD for a couple of songs you heard on the radio and the other 10 on the album you never heard of because the radio doesn't play them (and they generally sucked). When YOU want to buy a song, where did you hear it first so that you know you like it? How do you know you want to buy it?
I think the unlimited consumption model is good. Would people stop using it if they raised it a buck a month (like Netflix just did)? Doubtful. It's not going away, but it may become more expensive.
True. I think when you start to get into to lossless music, streaming really isnt what your wanting to do anyway. If you care that much about sound quality, then you have a different set up then most and you may as well just buy flac or vinyl or cd. Most people are listening on their phone with headset under $100, or through a single bluetooth speaker. So Tidal is just throwing money away. I have a better set up in my car then most people have in their home. I love the sound of music on two big speakers set up on opposite sides of the room.......you know, stereo!!!! You go somewhere and people put some music on, and its this stupid little single speaker, that they paid $300 for, no less. Oy
You must be with an expensive service. Spotify is currently £10 / month for an individual account, or £15 / month for a family account (five individual, independent accounts which can be shared between any 5 people, so as little as £3 / month each).
Oh yeah. For playback it is obviously smart to compress PCM using lossless codecs such as FLAC or in Apple's case ALAC. Would love to see Apple offer ALAC, even at 44.1kHz 16bit.
It's around CD quality, possibly even higher. But you're better off simply streaming PCM with no loss of resolution which ends up being (at least) as space efficient when losslessly compressed. MQA literally doesn't solve any problems but ends up creating some.
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If you really value your iTunes library it would be backed up. Computing basics. Why risk something you value?
And if you're following the basics you can try Apple Music without worrying about your library as it would be safely backed up.
OS X used to crash for fun when it first came out. iPhones locked up. Android used to lag terribly. Things change. Apple Music has been fine for me (ex long term Spotify user).
If you couldn't hear a problem with the sound quality until you read about it, that's a strong indicator that there was no problem.
Couldn't agree more. I signed up for their free trial last year and I think I used the app for a day or two before I went back to Spotify/Apple Music. To me, those two leading streaming music services (Google Play Music is a close third IMO).