I’ve talked before about my unhappiness with Spotify, but over the years of using Spotify, I’ve been getting increasingly tired of the platform shoving podcasts and audiobooks into my music streaming experience. There are blogs and rumors suggesting Spotify seems to be buying AI-generated imitation songs to profit from a lack of royalties, but these have been mostly debunked. Even if it’s debunked, there’s no denying that Spotify has an AI problem.

Spotify is the problem. So, I went looking for answers (again), and I decided to give Tidal a go.

Bear in mind, everything I’m about to write is coming from about 2 months of using Tidal, and mostly on an Android phone and on a Mac – sometimes I used an iPad, sometimes I used a Linux PC.

So, with that out of the way, Tidal is alright. For a purely music streaming platform, it’s good enough. It has flaws, but considering at the time of writing Tidal (the company) has 251-500 employees whereas Spotify (the company) has 5001-10,000 employees, I can forgive the app not being absolutely perfect. Besides, more competition is good for us.

The Good

At the most basic level, Tidal behaves like a streaming service – unlike Apple Music. You tap a song, it plays music (mostly) instantaneously. You pick another song, it plays (mostly) instantaneously. There are a few moments it doesn’t play straight away which I’ll discuss, but for the most part, Tidal behaves itself.

The music variety is also pretty good. I will say this much – for a music streaming service founded by a rapper, Tidal does seem to have a wonderful variety of music in its catalogue. I listen to hip hop, R&B, synthwave, rock music, jazz, 80s music, and 2000s dance/clubbing music – Tidal seems to have something every time.

Very few artists/tracks are missing from the library, and from what I’ve found, if there’s a missing track, you can always find another album or compilation which has the same track and just listen from there (the joys of music licenses).

In terms of the algorithmic recommendations, I find there’s a bit more variety in Tidal’s offering – while it does try and find similar tracks, I found at times with Spotify that the radio could really lock me in with songs that sound virtually identical. Tidal doesn’t go absolutely crazy – you’re still getting music in the same genre, but I find each track sounds melodically different.

If you liked how Spotify effectively generated a new playlist on the fly after your current album/playlist was done, Tidal does exactly the same. It’s almost like it kept all the good stuff from Spotify while ditching the stupid hokey bullshit like the AI DJ, podcasts, and audiobook.

If you have an Android phone that supports the use of SD card, you can store your music collection on the SD card! I find the SD card support a bit hit and miss on Android, I’m relieved it just works with the Tidal Android app.

Another aspect I personally like is the complete lack of social networking. Spotify seems to have this baked in, and I get that folks like to socialize with music, but I’m not one of them. That’s not to say I don’t like talking about music – I absolutely do like talking about music – and I do like talking to friends about music. I just don’t want to actively see what music my friends are listening to in real time. It feels very nosy and invasive.

One thing I’ve just realised is that Tidal doesn’t even have the concept of incognito/private mode like Spotify does, as with Tidal you just listen to music. With Spotify, you’re actively sharing to the world what you’re listening to. And in the event you’re whipping out the sex playlist, you’re going to need some privacy. Ironically, Tidal has privacy built in due to this lack of “feature.”

I mean, I’m still not going to get laid any time soon, but it’s a nice feature to have.

The Bad

So you remember above when I said

You tap a song, it plays music (mostly) instantaneously

On MacOS and Linux, it plays instantaneously It seems to play instantly and seamlessly, but will randomly give up playing at the end of a track. On my Android device, it plays mostly instantaneously. Sometimes the play button sits there with the circle spinning like a complete lemon (I have 1Gbps broadband speed – it is absolutely not my connection). I’ve even had this with tracks that I’ve downloaded onto my phone! Only once I’ve shoved it into offline mode does Tidal just play music instantly.

My guess is that Tidal’s servers are either failing to scale well, there is a bug in the Android app (post release edit: or in the server side software), or I may have got really unlucky and the Tidal servers were restarting or something while I was using the Android app. To be fair, I do mostly use Tidal on my phone and often in areas of poor network while traveling, but even at home it seems to be a challenge for the Tidal app. I also know my phone is capped at 100mbps with the Wifi (the joys of cheap Android phones), but to not be able to stream at 100mbps is beyond ridiculous.

The Things to Watch Out For

Naturally Tidal will set itself to stream music at its highest quality. After all, you’re basically paying for that high bitrate/audio quality. However on mobile you will pay for it – you’ll pay for it in terms of bandwidth/internet speeds, and you’ll pay for it in terms of disk/cache usage.

For me, I initially struggled to get music playing as the UK is so poorly equipped for 5G speeds, I was on 4G/4G+ speeds most of the time, and Tidal just sat there spinning. Once I got Tidal working and playing music, my phone was constantly complaining about low storage space – the culprit was Tidal.

On mobile I’ve turned the audio quality to its lowest, and now I have near-Spotify performance in terms of how quick it is to play music and how much storage it takes.

I don’t notice the low audio quality too much, and I definitely don’t miss it on mobile. It’s not like I’ll never take advantage of high audio quality when I can (desktop apps, hello!) but whatever gains I’ll get from high audio quality is completely crushed by waiting 10-20s for the track to play, and then eating up my storage space!

Tidal also offers Dolby surround sound, but it’s extremely dependent on a few factors like the device you’re using and what headphones you’re using to listen to. On my cheap Android phone (OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G – a name that rolls off the tongue), I can never get Dolby audio. On my Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, I can get Dolby audio with my Sony WH-1000XM4s. I’ve yet to test the iPad (2025), but I would be absolutely shocked if it didn’t work.

Furthermore, the web version of Tidal will not play audio at Max bitrate. Download the native apps if you’re on Windows/Mac, or if you’re on Linux then download Tidal Hi-Fi.