Evening Latte

Background

When I decided to start using a streaming music service back in 2021 instead of…other options, I tried Amazon Music, Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube Music. Amazon and YouTube were sorely lacking in a lot of categories, so they were quickly tossed aside. I ended up choosing Spotify because of Tidal’s mobile app stability issues, even though Spotify had its own issues with queue syncing.

Fun aside: after I did extensive testing that showed the Tidal mobile app had a specific offline playlist track limit (5,000) that would cause the app to crash when attempting to load or play the playlist, I sent a detailed summary to Tidal support. About nine months later, they emailed to ask if I would test the latest version of the app for the same issue. I paid for a month’s subscription, confirmed the bug still existed, and once again sent them all the details. I then requested they refund me the cost for the subscription, and they did.

A little less than a year after that, a friend’s Bluesky post about military AI investments by Spotify’s CEO planted the seed, and about a week later, I figured I’d give Tidal another shot. Based on another friend’s recommendation, I used TuneMyMusic to transfer my collection for $5.50 (a one-month subscription to their service). I cancelled the sub and unlinked my accounts after the transfer completed.

Similarities

• Both services have massive libraries that probably cover everything you like. That said, it might be worth checking some of your favorites songs before switching: when I transferred my Main playlist (9,063 tracks) from Spotify, 141 were missing in Tidal. Nearly all were albums or individual tracks from artists whose other content was on Tidal, so I’m assuming those specific albums/tracks had licensing issues.
• Both services offer offline listening via downloaded content as part of their paid plans.
• Both services offer ad-free listening as part of their paid plans.
• Both services offer artist/song suggestions and customized playlists.

Differences

Queue Sync Between Devices

Spotify has a queue sync process that attempts to align multiple devices on the same queue. The idea is that you can start listening to a queue on your computer, then when you get in your vehicle, Spotify will sync your previous queue (and progress) and start you where your computer left off.

That sounds great, but in my experience, it rarely works that way. How it actually works (for me):

• I listen to my Main playlist on my workstation all day while working.
• I get in my vehicle to go somewhere after work, and Android Auto launches Spotify on my phone.
• My phone has previously synced the same queue built from the Main playlist, but it doesn’t correctly sync the most recent track (from my workstation), so it resumes from the phone’s last played track. This often means it starts playing what I was listening to the last time I was in my vehicle, which is also what I started listening to at 8am that morning while working. My phone continues playing the same songs I heard in the same order that morning.
• If I refresh the Main queue on my phone, I will get new songs while driving. But as soon as the queue syncs on my workstation, it will also fail to recognize the correct last track from my last phone session at some point, and I’ll end up listening to the same set of songs I heard in my vehicle the day before.

The behavior has stayed consistent over three phones, two tablets, two workstations, and two vehicles. It only affects users who consistently listen to large queues non-concurrently between multiple devices; it all works much better if everything is always online at the same time, though switching the active device every time is a bit of a pain. Even though users have been requesting the option to disable queue syncing since 2014 and have continued to do so through the years, Spotify has repeatedly said they are not planning on giving users a native way to control that behavior.

90%+ of the time, I just listen to my Main playlist on shuffle. Since I constantly shift between devices (phone, tablet, workstation, Xbox), when I used the default settings, I would often hear the same sequence of songs twice a day, sometimes even three or four. My solution has been to put my phone and tablet in offline mode since this disables queue syncing. After doing so, I must also manually clear/refresh the queue on each device each time to ensure it won’t overlap with the others. Once a week, I allow the devices back online for a few minutes to report stream counts and sync playlist changes. But I have to be careful to not have the desktop app launched when I do that, or the mobile devices will sync that queue. It sounds so dumb when I type it all out.

Tidal has no queue syncing, so when I shuffle my music on each device, it generates a unique queue and runs down it independently. This allows me to keep my phone and tablet online at all times as long as I’m only actively playing through one device at a time. This is the primary draw of Tidal over Spotify for me.

Offline Storage Requirements

I generally prefer storing all my music offline so I’m not dependent on public Wi-Fi or cellular data while away from the house. Both Spotify and Tidal have had infrequent streaming issues, though most of them were right after adoption when I was messing with playback/audio quality settings.

• With Spotify configured to High quality, storing my Main playlist requires 63GB of storage.
• With Tidal configured to Low (320kbps) quality, storing My Collection requires 80GB of storage.

I’m currently unable to store my Tidal music offline on my 128GB phone, even after doing a factory reset to ensure there were no temporary files left over from my recent Android 16 upgrade.

When I buy my next phone, I can either stick with streaming on a 128GB model or pay an extra $80-100 to get the 256GB model so I can store everything offline. I’m currently leaning toward the latter.

Jams

Spotify Premium has a feature that allows users to host a Jam. They start a queue, then share the link with friends. Anyone with that link can then add tracks to the queue. It’s a fun way to have a unique variety of music at a party or hangout.

Tidal does not have a similar collaborative feature. Instead, it has a DJ feature that allows multiple people to listen to a shared queue, but only the host can add tracks.

Shuffle Quality

I think I have a little better sense of this than most users since I almost always listen to one large playlist on shuffle. I understand that no streaming music service’s shuffle functionality is truly random, and I think Spotify’s was various shades of mediocre from 2021 until recently. But starting 2-3 months ago, I think its algorithm started pushing certain tracks and artists heavier than before.

After a couple months, I decided to try to gather some objective data. On October 3rd, I did my normal online sync/offline/generate new queues sequence on all mobile devices, then let all everything play independently for a week without resetting their queues. I tried to record tracks I heard multiple times (using a Google Keep note). The results on October 10th:

Band of Heathens – Nobody Dies from Weed (2) (WS)
Big Smith – John Elvis (2) (WS)
blink-182  – One More Time (2) (WS)
Drew Holcomb – Postcard Memories (2) (WS)
Emily Kinney – This Is War (2) (WS)
Highwomen, The – If She Ever Leaves Me (3) (WSx2)
Nathaniel Rateliff – Three Fingers In (3) (P, WS)
Parker Millsap – Palisade (live) (3) (WSx2)
Tyler Childers – Feathered Indians (3) (WSx2)
Willy Tea Taylor – The Very Best (2) (P)
Xander Hawley – I Met Someone (2) (WS)
Xander Hawley – Your Shit Friend (2) (WS)

WS = workstation, P = phone for device that played them. I obviously couldn’t note that info for the first time I heard them.

So in the course of listening to a 9,000+ track, 550+ hour playlist across three devices over a week, I heard at least a dozen songs multiple times, and at least four songs three times. That included two pairs from Xander Hawley, who only had 36 songs on that playlist. Listening across three devices with separate queues does make multiple plays more likely, but three of the tracks were played at least twice on the same device. It’s also likely that I missed some repeats while I was riding my bike, doing complex tasks at work, or doing something else that required focus, so I almost assuredly under-reported the number.

For the next ten days, I listened almost exclusively to Tidal across those same devices, and the experience has been significantly different. There have been many “Oh yeah, that artist is in my playlist” moments, and while artists who have more entries (Dawes, Taylor Swift, Barenaked Ladies, Charley Crockett, Brandi Carlile, etc.) get played more often, my subjective impression is that it’s more aligned with the overall ratio than Spotify. I’ve probably had 3-4 tracks repeat, but I’ve refreshed the queues on each device multiple times while testing/finalizing things.

Volume Normalization

Tidal’s volume normalization seems to be significantly less effective than Spotify’s on at least the the desktop client. I’ve found myself adjusting the volume on my workstation pretty frequently during work days, whereas I only used two volume levels in Spotify for years: house windows opened/closed. When my windows were always closed in the winter, I didn’t change Spotify’s volume on my workstation for months.

Most of them have only been noticeable enough to adjust the volume a little, but these were nearly startling:

• Zach Bryan – You Are My Sunshine [to] Charley Crockett – Crystal Chandeliers and Burgundy
• Tyler Lyle – Things Are Better [to] Better Oblivion Community Center – Sleepwalkin’ (Daydreamin’ Version)
• Noah Gunderson – Running for Cover [to] blink-182 – FELL IN LOVE

Granted, these combos have very different vibes (especially the last one), but volume normalization exists to smooth out those differences, and Spotify’s version seems to accomplish that much better than Tidal’s.

Large Playlists

Though Tidal’s mobile app no longer crashes when viewing/playing large playlists, both it and the desktop client can struggle with even relatively small ones. Most notably, selecting Shuffle on a playlist with 50+ tracks will often result in randomized queue of the first 20-50 tracks. Sometimes viewing the queue will cause the rest of the tracks to be recognized/populated, but most of the time, the playlist must be scrolled to the end before all the tracks will be used. Not a huge deal for people with smaller playlists, but definitely annoying when the playlist has over 9,000 tracks. This has apparently been the case for a while.

After exploring the Tidal apps for a few days, I realized there was a better way to accomplish my use case. Instead of saving all my tracks in one large playlist, I’m now using the My Collection function. It doesn’t seem to be subject to the performance/functionality issues that plague playlists, it can shuffle all tracks at once, it can be searched, and individual track inclusion is indicated by a blue heart in most sections of the interface.

On Spotify, I’ve never had track loading or performance issues when using large playlists.

Artist Payments

Specific amounts vary slightly depending on the source and when they were published, but the most common claim is that Spotify pays 0.4 cents per stream while Tidal pays 1.2 cents.

As always, broader context is important: based on blog and social media posts from artists, revenue from streaming services is almost negligible for many low- or even moderate-volume performers: even at Tidal’s rate, it takes over 83,000 streams to generate $1,000 of pre-tax revenue. While it is ideologically better to use a service that pays a higher per-stream rate, for a person with average volume/variety of activity, buying a t-shirt from their favorite non-rich/indie bands will probably generate far more revenue for those artists than the sum of that user’s streaming activity for at least several years.

There is also the question of revenue distribution. How much of the streamer’s payout actually goes to artists varies widely depending on a few factors, with the most important one being ownership of the final mastered copies (“masters”) of each track. Generally, whoever owns the masters (usually the artist or their label) receives most or all of the revenue generated from the music’s usage. Back when artists basically had to have a label to front the cost of recording/publishing an album, a common (and valid) complaint was that contracts heavily favored labels for revenue distribution. While the internet and home recording now allow more flexibility, a lot of artists still sign contracts that give labels large percentages of their streaming revenues. So even if you switch to Tidal and generate more revenue from the artist’s streams, most of that might go to the label.

Overall popularity obviously also plays a big factor. If an artist gets generates 40,000 streams a year, their entire user base switching to Tidal would only increase their annual payout $320 (minus whatever may be owed to a label). If Taylor Swift’s entire base (26.6 billion streams on Spotify in 2024) switched to Tidal, she’d get another ~$213M/yr (she now owns all her masters), which is objectively a huge amount of money, but it would be on top of her estimated $700M/yr income. It seems like independent artists somewhere in the middle would see the largest relative benefit, such as the ability to quit their day job and pursue music full-time.

Song Quality/Fidelity

The available settings and their approximate bitrates in Spotify:

• Low (24kbps)
• Normal (96kbps)
• High: (160kbps)
• Very High: (320kbps)
• Lossless (24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC)

Tidal options:

• Low – 96kbps
• Low – 320kbps
• High (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC)
• Max (Up to 24-bit, 192kHz FLAC)

That seems to be a big win for Tidal, but the reality is that most people’s listening setups aren’t good enough to showcase the quality of lossless tracks. For starters, the versions of Bluetooth used on many headphones and speakers simply don’t have the capacity to handle a constant 320kbps audio stream, much less FLAC files (which are orders of magnitude larger). But even if transmission capacity is sufficient, devices like small speakers, earbuds, vehicles audio systems, consumer-focused headphones, and other common options either don’t have the frequency range/horn quality to reproduce sound accurately enough to differentiate or don’t have sufficient tuning/equalizer options to showcase the benefits of lossless media. In my experience, only a small subset of people can even tell the difference between a well-encoded 320kbps MP3 and a lossless file played on a well-tuned wired 5.1 system.

Because Tidal focuses so much on the very high end of the quality spectrum, I actually prefer Spotify’s options. If I really want to enjoy a track/album on my home theater, I can crank up the streaming quality over gigabit fiber internet and enjoy. But for everyday background scenarios that involve far less capable speakers and/or transmission over Bluetooth, a midrange option like 160kbps is sufficient, and it allows me to download my entire collection on my 128GB phone to avoid potential playback issues while driving in remote areas. Tidal’s huge non-FLAC gap between 96kbps and 320kbps means I’ll have to upgrade to a 256GB phone if I want to keep doing that.

Xbox Support

This one’s pretty simple: Spotify has an app on the Xbox store, and Tidal doesn’t. I like to play music in the background of games like Forza Horizon, RoadCraft, and Power Wash Simulator, and that can only be done via an app (browser background play isn’t supported).

I’m almost embarrassed by my low-tech solution: I bought a midrange standalone sound bar on sale (Sony HTS100F), put it in front of my TV, and linked it with my phone over Bluetooth. So when I play one of those games, I stream Tidal from my phone to the sound bar while the game audio comes out of my home theater speakers. Since the sound bar is less than a foot from the front center channel, everything mixes rather well, but I still feel a little dumb using two devices for such a simple scenario.

Minor App/UI Stuff

This isn’t a comprehensive list, just what I noticed.

• In the desktop version of Spotify, the volume can be adjusted in standardized increments by hovering the mouse cursor over the volume bar and scrolling the mouse wheel. One click was the difference between “windows open” and “windows closed” levels in my office. In Tidal, the slider must always be adjusted via normal clicking or sliding.
• In the desktop and mobile version of Spotify, there is an option to remove tracks from the current playlist via the queue list. There is no similar option in Tidal; one must go back to the main playlist, scroll to or search for the track, and remove it there.
• In the desktop and mobile version of Spotify, playlists can be sorted using attributes (name, last modified, etc.) as well as a custom option that allows the user to list them in whatever order they want. In Tidal, playlists can only be sorted by Created Date, Updated Date, or Alphabetical.
• In the desktop version of Tidal, selecting a track or album in the Update section opens the target object, but doesn’t close the Updates sliding section. One must manually close that section to see the thing that was just selected. Spotify goes to the selected thing and automatically closes its equivalent What’s New section.
• In Tidal, adding an album to My Collection does not automatically add all its tracks as well. I have to add each track, which is relatively easy in the desktop client (Shift and Ctrl work normally). But bafflingly, I can’t find a way to add multiple tracks at once in the mobile app, only add them to a playlist at the album level. I really hope I’m just missing it.
• The Spotify mobile app can integrate local audio files, including adding them to playlists. Tidal’s app doesn’t support any usage of local files.
• The Spotify mobile/desktop apps have a basic equalizer option with genre-specific presets. It obviously isn’t a replacement for a real equalizer with selectable frequencies, but it’s nice for users who have general preferences for how they like their music to sound. The Tidal apps don’t have an equalizer option.

Final Thoughts

The constant problems caused by Spotify’s attempted queue sync override everything else for me. Having to keep multiple devices offline (and manually allow each of them to sync periodically) to avoid listening to the same run of songs multiple times in a day is frankly ridiculous. In the week and a half or so I’ve been using Tidal, it has been eye-opening just how much less I have to manage it. Based on relatively heavy usage during that same time, Tidal’s shuffle quality also appears to be significantly better that what I’ve experienced on Spotify for the last couple months, and it turns out their My Collection functionality better aligns with my primary usage than playlists on either service.

But if queue syncing wasn’t a problem, it would be tough to choose Tidal over Spotify’s significantly better overall experience unless ideological factors had a lot of weight. More polished/intuitive client apps, integration options that come along with being the market leader, more audio quality options in most users’ realistic range, small-but-meaningful quality of life features like Jams and functional volume normalization, on and on. I don’t listen to podcasts, but some comments online suggest their library is currently much larger than Tidal’s (though Tidal is apparently catching up).

As always, everyone’s choice will be different based on their perspective and priorities. My goal is just to give others insight into my process so they can do their own version.