After Initiation/Conclusion:

Once the novelty of the red carpet feeling of Tidal’s presentation and feature-pushing wore out on me, which happened about a week into my free month, it was time to just start using Tidal as a regular streaming service and see how well it held up over time. After all, if Tidal expects to get the average consumer to pay monthly for this service, it’d better at least be a generally good streaming service after its luster wears out on you.

After the newness of Tidal and playing around with all its new features wore out on me and I was just left to use it casually until my free month expired, I came to one final conclusion: Okay, yeah, Tidal is actually a pretty decent music streaming service. Small gripes I’d had initially like the long loading times and asinine difficulty trying to find collaborative pieces between artists had kind of melted away as the orgasmic feeling one gets when listening to lossless audio was still prevalent every time I used the service.

Tidal is an easy service to use. It’s easy to let it replace whatever streaming service you’re currently using. Sure, there will inevitably be some music you like that was available on other services that’ll be unavailable for streaming here, but it’s easy to forget about its shortcomings and focus on what’s actually available. It has just enough of the features you would hope for in a music streaming service, with much better audio quality, and a few other minor additions that other consumers may get more use out of than I did.

However, towards the end of my free timed subscription, once I was sort of saying my goodbyes to my Tidal subscription, a realisation suddenly hit me; one that I hadn’t thought about, perhaps due to being distracted by the flashiness of Tidal on the whole. No matter what way you look at it, Tidal is just way too fucking expensive. The insane price tag was something I was willing to forgive in the event that the service had enough to offer to warrant paying that monthly, but it simply doesn’t. Lossless audio is a wonderful addition, but good luck sustaining a dependable user-base based on that alone.

One could argue that the artist compensation is a good enough reason to pay $20 a month, but I still question how much of that $20 is actually going to the artists. While it’s admirable that this service acknowledges the piss-poor artist compensation of the streaming generation and is trying to rectify that, we only really have their word that they’re actually offering more to labels and artists. Not to mention, since Tidal is co-owned by a multitude of world-famous musicians whose combined net worth is over 2 billion dollars, it makes you wonder if smaller-name artists are being paid as much per stream as their co-owners. If I listen to the song “Inside Out” by clipping. every day that I use Tidal, is the outfit making as much as, say, Daft Punk if I listen to their song “Give Life Back to Music” every day that I use Tidal?

No matter what way you look at it, Tidal is just way too fucking expensive.

As it stands, when you get right down to it, no, you, the consumer, shouldn’t subscribe to Tidal for more than the free month that it provides. Anybody who buys into Tidal’s smoke-blowing about being “the future of music” will likely be disappointed by their above-average-at-best offerings, because Tidal ultimately does very little to actually push the medium forward. It’s a decent streaming service with fantastic audio and little else to be worth its overinflated price. At $9.99 a month, I would absolutely recommend Tidal, because it does have better offerings than Spotify, but at $20 a month, Tidal falls flat on its face.