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Tidal price change1/16/2024 ![]() ![]() What you get on tape or disc is never what you heard in the room. As someone who’s attended hundreds of recording sessions as a producer, A&R executive, publisher, and manager, I consider the very act of recording sound to be destructive. Here’s where I set my audiophile credentials on fire. Did the people who originally built the internet dream of an online utopia where information could be free and that we’d all use open standards? They sure did, but that’s not how things have shaken out. MQA is a proprietary format whose investors (which include major label Warner Music) are looking for a royalty payment when streamers like Tidal use the format or manufacturers make their gear compatible. Let’s dispense with the reasons people are so dead set against it. Tidal has two family plans that give up to six individuals living at the same address independent accounts for $14.99 per month (Tidal HiFi) or $29.99 per month (Tidal HiFi Plus). That’s a rarity in an industry that reaps rich rewards from musicians while paying them a pittance. A Tidal HiFi Plus plan supports streaming at rates up to 9,216Kbps for $19.99/month, and Tidal pays up to 10 percent of that subscription cost directly to each subscriber’s most-streamed artist. You’ll get CD-quality streams for $9.99/month. The price of the service has changed, but mostly for the better. Let’s hope Tidal’s new majority shareholder, Square, keeps it that way. One thing that hasn’t changed: The depth and quality of the service’s library, particularly in terms of its high-resolution offerings. The music-streaming service Tidal has had its ups and downs since a cadre of artists ranging from Alicia Keys to Madonna, Jack White, and Deadmau5 headed up by Jay-Z acquired Tidal in early 2015. Tidal exhibits a genuine commitment to music-streaming’s potential, with an obvious sense that the recommendations are maintained by a team who knows their music. Tidal’s HiFi Plus plan is the most expensive option from any major service.Tidal started out as an artist-owned service but in March 2021 was purchased by Block (known at the time as Square) for nearly $300 million. ![]() It closed the first quarter of 2023 with some 210 million premium subscribers and a total of 515 million subscribers overall. Spotify is the only of the major services to officially release usage numbers. Spotify and YouTube Music come in at the most frugal by one whole dollar. The price increase brings Tidal in line with the likes of Apple Music and Amazon Music for individual plans. Whether any of that will actually make a difference to your ears is very much open to dispute, but at least it’s an option. It’s also what you’ll need if you want to listen to anything in Dolby Atmos or Sono’s 360 Reality Audio format. There’s also the high-end HiFi Plus plan - whose price apparently is not changing - which ramps quality up to a whopping 9216kbps thanks to the MQA protocol. The Family plan gets you all that for up to six accounts on a single plan. The HiFi plan tops out at 1411 kbps, is ad-free, allows for offline listening, has live events, and lets you listen on supported high-end devices from Lumin, KEF, and the like. Tidal’s free plan pipes in songs at up to 160kbps and supports itself with advertising. What it lacks in market share - it’s far behind the likes of Spotify and Apple Music - Tidal makes up for in terms of options for those who want higher bitrates and (theoretically, anyway), better-sounding streaming music. ![]()
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