Tidal was the first promise of a decent competitor to Spotify and I jumped immediately. Spotify has had so many requests for features that they have completely ignored and consistently made their ux worse across every device for the two...maybe three years I've been a paying customer.

A feature request to prefer explicit over clean and vice versa when possible has been on their request board for nearly two of those. For a long time it was difficult to even select or search for the version you wanted.

They ignore their customers, break their UI, fail to optimize for conversions to paying customers, how could they expect to be profitable?

So far I've been extremely happy with Tidal. It's gotten quickly better and I'm excited to see how the artist based model plays out. It's odd to me that the author laments the plight of the starving and ignored artists while calling Tidal a joke. Their stated mission is to improve the landscape for artists, they have a real opportunity to build on top of and change the indie scene and I think they'll take it.