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Between 7digital, HD tracks, Qobuz store, and my local physical media store, Tidal has never made sense to me. For $15 or $20 a month I can buy and own every track and album I want.
I use bottom-of-the-barrel Pandora for streaming when I am working out or washing dishes. That's it.
They're still immeasurably better than Spotify, both for artists and in terms of bitrate...
The sad thing it, for streaming "stations", Pandora still has the best algorithms and functioning (thumbs up/down only being applicable to that specific 'station').
It's a shame they've neglected their apps and almost everything else about their business.
I hope it’s still the case as I have Tidal subscription, but they were the ones giving the most money per stream to the artist.
I wouldn’t want to move to another streaming platform unless they are even better for artists.
From what I’ve read (although my numbers are a few years old), Qobuz and Napster pay artists even more than Tidal. The former even significantly so (about 3x, from what I’ve read), although it is slightly more expensive. Both also support lossless audio.
And, for completion: Among the big-tech streaming services, the one that seems to pay the best is Apple Music, with a little more than half of what Tidal pays. The worst ones are amazon and Spotify which both pay about a third of Tidal.
I’m back to pirating all of my music. I will buy CDs or pay for downloads for artists that I really like or smaller artists, but I am fucking through with the streaming platforms. They just enshittify more and more.
I never stopped. I have streaming video and audio subscriptions, But I've never stopped keeping up my catalogs.
Every time I get over invested in one company or another they end up going out of business or selling and reducing half of their catalog. I'll give d+ their sub for Agatha, I'll give Hulu their sub for Futurama. When Wednesday comes back I'll swap D+ for Netflix for the season again. But every single one of those episodes still goes to my local archive The same as if I would have recorded or a VHS tape in the '90s.
your foresight is much better than mine! I even deleted a bunch of my old stuff because, “I can just stream it whenever I want to watch it”… they took me for a fool, and they were right!
Back before streaming I was using the Netflix DVD plan ripping and dropping them on 4.7g blanks. I had a few binders of just my favorite stuff. I owned all the originals for all the Disney that I could get my hands on and all of my favorite cult classics. But what I was really missing was TV shows. TV shows are just expensive as hell in DVD format.
When streaming hit I finally got around to testing Netflix out. My child got fixated Chuggington. He was halfway through when they pulled it from the streaming service. I started digging around, but at the time it was really hard to find TV content. I eventually managed to get the rest of chuggington. I bought a lifetime subscription to playon, and from then on anytime he started to show a strong interest in a show I would just go ahead and record the whole thing I put it locally on tversity at the time. But Netflix just kept having the same patterns of dropping stuff off. The websites started with these are the things you should watch before they disappear from Netflix. I was just done with trusting them.
Years later the same kind of things happened with Amazon. I remember Sheriff Callie being a real pain in the rump. It went from free streaming to purchase seasons only overnight.
Eventually, Playon abandoned their lifetime client and I just went straight to newsgroup/torrent.
Just cancelled my subscription when they killed Plex integration.
I've never understood the use case for this. How did you use it?
I used it for songs that weren't on Tidal when I transferred playlists from Spotify. I found quite afew that I liked that Tidal didn't have. Now that that's gone I've moved to Deezer and am filling out my Plex server separately.
It seamlessly integrated your own local media with tidal. Instead of encoding or downloading, you could just add tidal music as if you had a physical copy of it. It could also be used for radio and plexamp mixes.
Wow is it still a thing? I had no idea. It always seemed to sit in this weird limbo between Spotify and YouTube Music (for people who just want to listen to music) and Qobuz and HD Tracks (for people who just want to listen to their new £250 power leads). Never sure what it was actually for.
Cheaper than Spotify for the number of users it gives you (at least where I live) and the app itself has functioned significantly better than Spotify's has in my experience so far while not depriving me of any of the artists and albums I listen to regularly. Early on in its life it was big time selling snake oil, but at this point it's just a solid alternative to Spotify and YouTube music which have both, frankly, gotten "too big to fail" and have begun enshittification because of it. Man we need more competition...
YouTube music used to be good when it was Google music. But i think the app has been improving YouTube music is becoming better.
Ahhhh nothing like some good enshitification
Well peasants all split intro group of three because the bigger the daddy corp, the more "convenient" the service. So here we be 🤡
I've had a Tidal subscription for about a year. It's recommendation algo is way way better than Spotify and there are none of those spammy 1 minute tracks that Spotify has because 'artists' have gamed the system.
They don't have a Linux app but the PWA works fine. Minimize the window to reduce CPU usage (I know that sounds crazy but it actually works).
Same, it's fine and no joke rogan
That is a package like "tidal-hifi" or something like that that can basically put the web app on your linux desktop ad an app.
Their UI is super slow. That’s why the CPU usage gets better. It’s slow in Safari too.
Their sound quality is just significantly better compared to Spotify. Even with my bluetooth earbuds I can hear the difference. Spotify and Youtube just sound muddy in comparison.
They’re not the only ones anymore though. Apple, Amazon, Deezer, Qobuz and Napster also have lossless audio support.
Flac Audiophile types with equipment and no desire to pirate?
HDtracks.
That being said if you're buying FLACs from major labels for $40 while indie bands release albums in FLAC via band camp for $3, you're a chump.
The members of Led Zeppelin that are still alive don't need the money nearly as much, and even if they did most of it isn't going to them anyways.
Hey some of us also use 7digital and Qobuz store. ;)
What's a Tidal?
A wave of layoffs.
Funny guy - they're gonna fire you last. 😁
Lol
A music app like Spotify founded by Jay-Z.
The proposal was to pay the artists more.
Sounds good, but I think the majority goes to the labels anyways, so it doesn't change much for the artists.
The main issue is executives basically enslaving their artists with "360 deal" contracts.
It was a Norwegian platform called Wimp, but Jay-Z bought it, rebranded it to Tidal and moved HQ from Oslo to the states.
Spotify actually pays 70% of the streams to the label, which trickles down to a bunch of nothing for the artist. Tidal wanted to change that and pay directly to the artist
How is that possible if the labels own the music and there's a contract that sets the percentages.
All music streaming services say "paying the artist" in their communication.
Well, turns out Tidal has ended that program last year: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2023/03/01/tidal-direct-payments-program-ends/
Now, weeks after partnering with Universal Music Group to develop a “new economic model for music streaming,” the Block-owned platform has officially ended the Direct Artist Payouts (DAP) program.
Yeah, they made a deal with the devil it seems
UMG is the main actor with the 360 deals for artists. And that's just the top of the iceberg. The Diddy case might show the bottom.
A music app like Spotify founded by Jay-Z
Really? That's not how I remembered it, I just thought he bought the existing service Wimp and rebranded it. Kudos to Jay-Z if he actually made a music streaming app though.
Streams flac. Good supplement to piracy. I might switch to Qobuz sometime, but it works well for now.
Dang. I would have supported this, until I found out Jay Z set this up.
You could say.... a wave of redundancies.
Like the tides, what went up will eventually go down.
