Tidal vs. Spotify

Still in love with Tidal here. And while the suggestions, artist radio, and interface of Spotify are super-convenient, imagine going back five years in time with the following offer:

Them: We'll give you CD-quality access to 85% of the recorded albums in the history of music, for $20 a month.

Me: Yeah, well, it sucks if it won't pick out the music I want to listen to for me.

I'd look like a real a**hole, wouldn't I?

I can see a lot of reasons why Spotify users haven't migrated.

Do this, just for one example...pretend you want to explore the decade of the 1970s and put "70s" in the search box of Tidal, and then do the same in Spotify. If you put "70s" in the Spotify search box you get lots of playlists with great 70s music, whether you want disco, glam rock, AM radio hits, etc. That same search on Tidal gets you around 5 or 6 limited playlists of actual songs by their original artists. The rest are made up of tribute-band songs...great hits done by someone nobody has ever heard of. That's just one example. Go ahead and try it...the 3rd playlist shown is not of original artists, the 4th isn't even 70s songs. One of the lists is "Woman of Rock", including Alanis Morisette...had she even hit puberty by the end of the '70s?

I'm sure once their library gets bigger, and they hire someone who was alive in the 1970s to make sure their '70s playlists don't have Alanis Morisette on them, they'll hit their stride and you'll see people flock there in droves. I just don't think they're there yet.

That is not accurate about Tidal and the 70s search. That would yeild just 4-5 playlists but they can be 40 hours long, so youre talking 100-200 tracks. The way to search is to type in a specific artist of the search, IE say, Elton John (70's) or Mama Cass, etc.... then see what coms up. That will keep you busy for months.

Oh... they're there.

But, Cerrot, it's so _inconvenient_ to have to _think_ of the name of the artist or album I want to hear. ;-)

You're absolutely wrong Cerrot, I stand by my previous message. Those 4-5 playlists aren't hundreds of songs long, they're 35-45 songs long. And if you do a search under Elton John, as you suggest, the results return exactly 4 playlists that have anything to do with the 1970s. Just did it myself, looking at it onscreen right now.

If you do a search under Mama Cass, again as you suggest, you get exactly 3 playlists...2 of which are for songs from 2015, and one which has over 400 songs but any connection to the 1970s is purely random - it includes songs from Benny Goodman and Bruno Mars. Bruno Mars wasn't even alive in the 1970s. Go ahead, try it yourself, you'll see what I'm seeing. Did you actually do any of the searches you suggest, before typing your last message?

I'm not saying Tidal is a poor service, I'm simply explaining to you why it's not head-scratching why everyone with access to an internet connection hasn't signed up. Having bitrate isn't enough, they also have to have the library AND the interface and search algorithms to access it. Some days, I've worked so hard my brain is fried, I don't know who I want to listen to, I want to sort of just listen to random radio from a particular time period and maybe re-discover songs I'd forgotten about. We're talking about decade-related playlists...I'm not asking it to make up a playlist of artists who enjoy playing Scrabble on weekends while wearing rasberry berets. A decade-playlist isn't rocket science.