Spotify is the world’s most popular streaming service, offering high-quality audio and an immense library containing music and a wide variety of podcasts. Tidal has a pretty good competitive edge thanks to lossless audio, podcasts, and video content. To help you decide which streaming service comes out on top in the Tidal vs Spotify battle, we’ve analyzed the different features of each app. These include everything from audio quality and pricing to music discovery and social features.
Spotify has a free plan for its listeners but with ads along with a couple of limitations. Free users can only play music in shuffle mode and skip tracks only six times per hour. Spotify Premium costs $10.99 per month for ad-free service. If you’re a student, Spotify costs only $5.99 per month. You can also enjoy the family plan for up to six accounts at $16.99.
Tidal costs $9.99/month for HiFi and $19.99/month for HiFi-Plus, both offers 30 days free trial. The main difference is music quality. Tidal offer offer a free tier with ads. Tidal free doesn't support offline playback, same as Spotify free.
Spotify Premium provides three sound quality levels: normal, high and extreme. Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis, and it was a semi-popular format a decade ago. At Standard setting, music streams at 96kbps, which sounds a lot better than MP3 at 129kbps. Switch up to the high quality setting and the bitrate bumps up to 160kbps. The extreme setting uses 320kbps, which is perceptually close to lossless. Spotify announced a lossless audio tier: Spotify HiFi. It will offer CD-quality audio, and all devices will support Spotify HiFi, including Spotify Connect smart speakers.
The Tidal HiFi membership offers four settings for streaming quality: Normal, High, HiFi, and Master Quality Authenticated (MQA). The Normal setting is designed to limit the amount of Internet data being used because streaming high quality files take up a lot of data. The High setting tops out at 320kbps and uses AAC files. The HiFi setting offers CD-quality lossless FLAC files, meaning they are 44.1kHz/16bit. Master quality audio files are 96kHz/24bit FLAC or WAV files. If a song is labeled as MQA on Tidal, it means that the artist authenticated it themselves, but not all songs are available in this high quality format.
Spotify is known for exceptional music discovery, thanks to a hybrid algorithm that analyzes a song’s language and raw audio combined with your in-app listening habits. It’s mainly due to this algorithm that Spotify has an abundance of personalized playlists. Spotify’s Made For You section, in particular, is a haven for adventurous listeners. Release Radar and Discover Weekly, which offer up fresh music every week. Tastebreakers, which suggests tunes from artists and genres you don’t usually listen to. Mixes like “Your Daily Mixes” and “Your Genre Mixes” are playlists that combine songs already in your library and new ones that the algorithm thinks you’ll like.
Tidal also uses algorithms to learn your music tastes and recommend songs. It creates up to eight playlists that focus on eight different genres that you listen to a lot and have saved to “My Collection,” called “My Mix”. If you only listen to three genres regularly, however, it only gives you three playlists. These update gradually, rather than on a weekly schedule like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. And, if you like the “My Mix” you’re listening to today, you can save it as a separate playlist that isn’t lost forever when the mix updates.
Spotify has a Friend Activity section which displays the songs your friends are actively listening to along with the album or playlist they are listening from. Unfortunately, this section is only available on the desktop app for Spotify, not the mobile app. You can follow friends by searching their usernames or by linking your Spotify account with Facebook. However, if you don’t want people to be able to view your Spotify activity, you can always disable the feature that publishes your activity. You can save your friends’ playlists to your library and create collaborative playlists where multiple friends can add and remove songs. Spotify also has partnerships with Instagram and Tinder, so it’s easy to share your music tastes with people on these apps as well.
Tidal, on the other hand, allows you to share the song you love on social media. There are no other social features available. You can’t see what your friends are listening to or how popular certain artists and playlists are. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on your preference.
Both Spotify and Tidal are popular music streaming platforms with a fairly similar pricing plan. However, Spotify offers a free ad-supported version, which Tidal clearly lacks. Spotify is also more social than Tidal and you can listen to what your friends are listening to. Spotify also works with Google Maps and Waze, while Tidal supports only Waze.
Hopefully, this article will help you with your decision. If not, there’s always the option of a 30-day free trial to get a better sense of both streaming services.
There are a handful of services that can help you transfer your Spotify music to Tidal. The best free tool is Pazu Spotify Converter . It supports downloading all kinds of Spotify content offline at a faster speed. It can not only convert Spotify to MP3 but also M4A, WAV, etc. in batch. Pazu Spotify Converter uses the most advanced downloading technology to convert Spotify songs. So it can keep the lossless audio quality of Spotify songs for you. The ID3 tags, Meta Data such as the year, album cover, etc. will be kept also.
Download, install and run Pazu Spotify Converter on your Mac or Windows. Log in your Spotify account with the built-in Spotify web player.
Pazu Spoitfy Converter features built-in Spotify web player for you to browse or search Spotify songs, albums and playlists you want to download directly on the interface. You don’t need to install Spotify app. Click the album or playlist you want to download and then click the red icon to load all songs.
The default output format is MP3. Pazu Spotify Converter also supports M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, AIFF. Click Option button to change output format or output folder if you need. You can also change bitrate, samplerate according to your needs.
Click Convert button to start recording Spotify music to the format you choose.
After conversion, click the folder icon to quickly locate the DRM-free Spotify song. You can then move and play it anywhere.
Note: The free trial version of Pazu Spotify Converter enables you to convert the first three minutes of each song. You can remove the trial limitation by purchasing the full version.
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Download and convert any Spotify songs, albums, playlists to MP3/M4A etc.