Tidal currently has over 30 million tracks on its books, around the same as Spotify and Apple Music. You’ll also need a good pair of headphones. Most of the latest top-end handsets have decent DAC and support 24-bit/192kHz music playback. If you’re listening on a smartphone, you’ll need a device with decent digital-to-analogue conversion or ‘DAC’. What’s the difference? Tidal’s high-fidelity sound is only available on the premium tier, this means that for $19.99 you’ll be able to listen to CD quality music using the Free Lossless Audio Codec or ‘FLAC’. Tidal costs $9.99 a month for the standard service and $19.99 for the ‘premium’ service.

Here’s how it all breaks down:Ĭost: $9.99 or $19.99 for the premium tier What generated so many column inches for Tidal - aside from the bizarre star-studded launch event - was its promise of lossless audio and HD music videos. Tidal was the brain-child of tech company Aspiro, which was acquired by Jay Z’s company earlier this year. Tidal has a superstar roster of supporters/shareholders and one mega-star with his finger on the button - Jay Z.

Apple music vs spotify quality