I’m a musician and have loved listening to music off any medium (record, tape, cd, MP3) since I was a kid. With the advent of online streaming services (and I’ll speak to all the ones I’ve used or am using) I use more than one due to a number of factors. I’ll attempt to break this down and explain why I was using more than one as well why I’m going to be moving to Tidal.
Rdio
Now dead, Rdio was the best streaming service until it closed its doors in 2015 and sold off all its assets to Pandora. What I loved about this platform was the ease of which I could search and find certain artists or songs, I could easily share either socially or directly to other Rdio users from the player and sound quality was excellent. More on these items later as Rdio was where I got started streaming music and was sad to see it go.
Apple Music
With most of my personally owned (read ripped) music living on a 120GB external drive, exported at some point from AudioGalaxy, Napster and Winamp, moving to MacOS my only option (at the time) was to play via iTunes. I will not get into the pain that is the iTunes UX but that’s why I’ve always looked for alternatives to Cupertino’s media management app. When Apple launched Apple Music with the ability to stream songs based on a subscription service I was very interested. I signed up and started adding whatever music I could find which turned out was not much. Also, I hate iTunes… searching with any accuracy whatsoever in this app is futile at best and usually the results were nowhere near what I was looking for. The streaming experience was awful as was the phone app which I used in the vehicle to stream while driving. I only lasted about 2-3 months on this service and was completely fed up with the horrific search, buggy apps and UI and glitches in playback using iTunes.
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Google Play Music
Since I’m an Android user and long time Google Apps (GSuite?) user, it made complete sense to me to switch to Google Play Music. I was dubious at first but the immediate ease-of-use in the online app had me sold. I still use Google Music and am mainly on the service because there are certain Artists, Songs and Albums that exist in this service that don’t on Spotify (the other service I use). Really there’s not much difference between Google Play Music and Spotify with the exception of a few things but I will sum up here.
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Spotify
I read somewhere that Spotify would be streaming at a minimum 320kbps bitrate and as an audiophile, I was all for it after hearing the various results from Google Play Music. I signed up for Spotify and still have an account today to essentially supplement the missing artists and albums that are missing from Google Play Music. Really there’s not much difference between that and Spotify and the reason I just kept both around since together they had the song catalog I wanted. There are some differences between them and I’ll summarize here:
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Tidal
Tidal came out in 2014 and was purchased by none other than Jay-Z. Another streaming service added to the fray and I just couldn’t be bothered having experienced 3 and continued to use 2 of them. That said, I visited The Audio Room in Calgary and was treated to a demo of some very expensive (read, I will never own) Focal speakers streaming Toto via the Tidal Streaming Service. I listened and could not believe the quality of music coming through the speakers. I went home and had to see if the quality was the same on my old-school JBL speakers. It was… I was amazed. I was able, through Sonos, to play samples of the same song (Steve Miller Band, Fly Like an Eagle) on Google Play Music, Spotify and Tidal. It was a no brainer after hearing the difference between the first two (which are pretty much identical) and then Tidal. I signed up for the HiFi subscription which has a lossless format of 1411KBPS and MQA. This week I’ve been building all the same playlists I use Google and Spotify (merged) for with absolutely no issue finding songs or artists at all. In fact, the search in Tidal’s web, desktop and mobile apps is stellar. I have yet to find issue with any search for music at all. What’s interesting is that there are video results as well, likely to compete with the results found in Google Play searches. For me it’s a simple switch… super high quality streaming, excellent UX, excellent search, fantastic catalog of music and seamless integration across all of my devices.
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