The Future:

While I came to the conclusion whilst using Tidal that it does very little to live up to its self-created hype of being a next-level music streaming service, one question persistently lingered in my mind: What could a music streaming service do in this day and age to push the medium forward? Even as an affluent consumer in the music streaming industry, I have difficulty answering this question myself. As far as the most prominent and commercially successful services in the music streaming game go, they’re already in a pretty fantastic place for the consumer, offering you the wide world of music at the convenience of your fingertips for an affordable price.

And while yes, the most popular horses in this race are all but anti-reasonable artist compensation, is a just-okay streaming service coming in and charging the consumer way too much for not enough going to be what advances the music streaming industry? I have a hard time believing that it will. The average person that subscribes to Spotify monthly does it because they enjoy the convenience of the service, its affordability and its offline capabilities, and they don’t care at all about the quality of the audio they’re listening to, as most of them are probably listening to them through their pack-in Apple earbuds or manically-overpriced Beats by Dre headphones.

High quality audio is a feature I would like to see more streaming services pushing, but you have to keep in mind that this is coming from an audiophile who owns headphones worth over $200 retail that throws a hissy fit if he has to listen to music in anything lower than 320kbps. As others (below) have pointed out, the average music consumer doesn’t care if they’re listening to the new Nicki Minaj or Beyoncé single in .MP3, .WAV, .AAC, or .FLAC. The average consumer probably doesn’t even know what most of those even mean.

In general, Tidal just has no idea what sort of audience they want to be targeting. I would pay $10 a month for a service with lossless audio that has as much to offer as Spotify or Tidal, but I’m a part of a niche audience of people that cares a lot about audio quality. And while I may enjoy the music of at least a handful of the performers that co-own the service, the average audiophile probably isn’t scrambling to pay $20 a month because they want to directly support Kanye West or Alicia Keys or Deadmau5 or Madonna, and is dying to hear their music in beautiful .FLAC quality. A service made exclusively for audiophiles would probably be about as niche as a website like Splice. It’d be like Analogue Interactive announcing a new CMVS unit and trying to rope in high-end Neo Geo snobs by announcing that their new system is co-owned by Infinity Ward, Ubisoft, EA, and Konami. Can’t exactly say it’d go over amazingly well.

I would pay $10 a month for a service with lossless audio that has as much to offer as Spotify or Tidal, but I’m a part of a niche audience of people that cares a lot about audio quality. And while I may enjoy the music of at least a handful of the performers that co-own the service, the average audiophile probably isn’t scrambling to pay $20 a month because they want to directly support Kanye West or Alicia Keys or Deadmau5 or Madonna, and is dying to hear their music in beautiful .FLAC quality.

To put it simply, while Tidal perhaps isn’t as blisteringly awful as its greatest detractors have made it out to be, it really isn’t worth buying into. If you’re a Spotify consumer and Tidal’s Hi-Fi price tag drops down to $10, I recommend subscribing then, but in its current state, Tidal is way more interesting and relevant as a conversation piece than it is as a streaming service. Don’t buy into the hype for it, positive or negative, just let it fall into obscurity. And if you’re one of those rampant Tidal detractors whom only clicked on this article to read a reassurance of your own extremely negative opinion of the service on principle, here’s my advice for you: Don’t let Tidal take up space in your mind. Just forget about it, don’t give it any more negative press, and then smugly masturbate while reading its eulogies on major music publications when it inevitably folds a year or two down the road.

Your friend,
Jess Casebeer