I can't forgive Tidal for their promotion of MQA, nothing more than a scam to fleece audiophiles who don't know better out of their money.

MQA isn't lossless and distorts audio: https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc

Tidal HiFi isn't lossless either: https://goldensound.audio/2021/11/29/tidal-hifi-is-not-lossl...

I don't think any of the streaming services are particularly friendly to artists either, but Apple Music pays more to the artist than Spotify does, and includes (real) lossless audio at no extra cost. For now, they've got my dollar.

I have a somewhat biased opinion since I work in ML close to people building recommender systems at Netflix, but I think Tidal is a great showcase of the pros and cons of algorithmically curated content VS human curated. Tidal playlists are mostly human-curated and excellent. However it does not scale: it does not cover the long tail of wide ranges and nuances of musical preferences, nor does it cover such preferences over a large range of time. Their recommendation engine is orders of magnitude worse than Spotify's one. On the other hand, I also find that Spotify sometimes pushes algorithmic curation too far: one example of that is when they used to force an algorithmically-driven order of songs when playing an album instead of a linear order (until Adele complained loudly). I think there's a balance here: Spotify could benefit from some human-curated playlists that don't only cover mainstream genres, but Tidal should definitely invest into their recommendation engine which is really subpar, especially so because a much smaller user-base makes this problem harder to solve well.

Apple Music is a better choice than Tidal and far better than Spotify.

They offer $0.010/stream versus $0.003-$0.005 for Spotify and $0.013 for Tidal.

Also offers the best quality audio with lossless up to 24-bit/192Hz without using MQA.

As in that bad? Besides they haven’t been able to figure Apple Login out. In recent many months they’re the only ones where Apple Login just doesn’t work.

> The UI is on par with Spotify.

Is there such a thing as hi-fi podcasts they are pushing on you? Or do you mean they are really trying to make you hear the Best Hi-fi 2022 playlist by some random? No, they must have some kind of official podcast to push, I'm sure..

Same here. The sound quality difference is kind of astonishing. I wasn't expecting there to be any difference, but it's so noticable that one must wonder what Spotify is doing to "round out" their sound so much.

One thing I really liked about Tidal was how detailed the credits for the albums are. It's very useful for Jazz fans in particular I think to look at who was a sideman on an album and who else they played with.

> they focus on hi-fi audio

IIRC high quality on Spotify is Vorbis at 320kbps. If you can tell the difference between that and lossless, I'm impressed.

what genres do you listen to, and have you ever been unable to find something you were looking for?

I love that Tidal has folders to better organize playlists. Spotify doesn't. So to me, in some ways, Tidal is much better.