I switched to Tidal a couple years ago and I’m happy enough with it. It’s cheaper than the comparable membership tier I was paying for with Spotify. The higher fidelity streaming is nice and supposedly it pays artists the most over any other steaming service. Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t index so heavily on your favorite tracks like Spotify’s does, so I’m discovering new music a lot more.
The UX isn’t quite as smooth as Spotify’s. I can’t cast from the browser app and it doesn’t remember what I’m listening to between devices. When I first switched there were a lot more bugs but I haven’t noticed as many over the last year.
After Tidal inevitably succumbs to corporate rot, I’ll be switching to owning my own collection and self-hosting. But until then, I’m happy with Tidal.
Tidal is owned by Square (the mobile payment app/company), and I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) owns that. So, probably safe to say it’s already pretty corporate.
As someone who was briefly interested in his podcast/video blogs, it becomes highly apparent that his approach to everything - even something as personal as music - is completely backwards and wholly centered on poor metrics around perceived efficiency as opposed to anything remotely logical. His ideas are fully derivative of the latest trends in the worst way while missing the point on how to implement them in any kind of reasonable way. He’s just another member of the modern-category Silicon Valley CEO: hoodwink everyone, hop on bandwagons, get yours first for the least amount of cost, market yourself as an enigma, who cares about the actual product, when in doubt do lay-offs.
Honestly I respect the way he called musk on his bluff and forced him to pay 40+ Billion for Twitter, but this article cements him as an asshole in my book. Whenever you see a CEO saying “we need to function like a startup” what they really mean is “I have no fucking clue how to run this business, so I’m going to go back to the one thing that worked for me”, not realizing that it was mostly luck not startup culture that cemented their early success.
Talking in CEO speak seems pretty mild compared to being on the board of an AI military company. I know there is no perfect billionaire so I’m not going to advocate for Dorsey. But if that is the worse thing about Tidal, I think I’ll still support it.
Sure! I was just trying to answer the question. I’d point out that his current attitude is exactly how enshitification starts, so the writing may be on the wall for Tidal. After all, it was started as a passion project by a group of actual musicians and then sold, so the soul of it is likely gone too.
I switched to Tidal a couple years ago and I’m happy enough with it. It’s cheaper than the comparable membership tier I was paying for with Spotify. The higher fidelity streaming is nice and supposedly it pays artists the most over any other steaming service. Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t index so heavily on your favorite tracks like Spotify’s does, so I’m discovering new music a lot more.
The UX isn’t quite as smooth as Spotify’s. I can’t cast from the browser app and it doesn’t remember what I’m listening to between devices. When I first switched there were a lot more bugs but I haven’t noticed as many over the last year.
After Tidal inevitably succumbs to corporate rot, I’ll be switching to owning my own collection and self-hosting. But until then, I’m happy with Tidal.
Tidal is owned by Square (the mobile payment app/company), and I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) owns that. So, probably safe to say it’s already pretty corporate.
That guy sucks.
Why?
As someone who was briefly interested in his podcast/video blogs, it becomes highly apparent that his approach to everything - even something as personal as music - is completely backwards and wholly centered on poor metrics around perceived efficiency as opposed to anything remotely logical. His ideas are fully derivative of the latest trends in the worst way while missing the point on how to implement them in any kind of reasonable way. He’s just another member of the modern-category Silicon Valley CEO: hoodwink everyone, hop on bandwagons, get yours first for the least amount of cost, market yourself as an enigma, who cares about the actual product, when in doubt do lay-offs.
This is just the first article I found
https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/jack-dorsey-layoffs-streaming-music-app-tidal-block-leaked-email/
Honestly I respect the way he called musk on his bluff and forced him to pay 40+ Billion for Twitter, but this article cements him as an asshole in my book. Whenever you see a CEO saying “we need to function like a startup” what they really mean is “I have no fucking clue how to run this business, so I’m going to go back to the one thing that worked for me”, not realizing that it was mostly luck not startup culture that cemented their early success.
Talking in CEO speak seems pretty mild compared to being on the board of an AI military company. I know there is no perfect billionaire so I’m not going to advocate for Dorsey. But if that is the worse thing about Tidal, I think I’ll still support it.
Sure! I was just trying to answer the question. I’d point out that his current attitude is exactly how enshitification starts, so the writing may be on the wall for Tidal. After all, it was started as a passion project by a group of actual musicians and then sold, so the soul of it is likely gone too.
Spotify used to be the good guys, too.
Yes, but it’s a million times better than Spotify, Google, and Apple.
Isnt Tidal responsible for the problems of high quality music formats like .ogg? Making it hard to find and download from them.