Be Like Neil Young

On Quitting Spotify for Tidal

Among the assets of Tidal is that unlike Spotify, it displays album art full size.

I’m listening to Neil Young on Tidal and thinking that it’s come a time for y’all to look long and hard at your music streaming service, whatever it is, and ask yourself if it’s doing a good job for your audio life and for the music ecosystem. In a world of subscription fatigue, I get that it’s easier to roll along with your own personal status quo, but this is your music we’re talking about, and you have agency, and maybe you should make a move.

Suddenly platform shopping is hot, because the great sage, the iconic song master, the 76-year-old Canadian, Mr. Young, just had his lifelong record label Reprise/Warner Bros. pull his music from Spotify as a protest against the streaming behemoth’s support of Joe Rogan, the smugly contrarian podcaster whose show has been spreading false information about Covid vaccines. Spotify “can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” Young wrote in an open letter Jan. 24. And remarkably, Young’s catalog, one of the most important in rock and roll and folk, has vanished from Spotify’s realm. In solidarity, Joni Mitchell followed suit, which is devastating. And an unknown number of people, enough to make a stir on the internet, quit the service, temporarily backlogging Spotify’s customer service portal. The hashtag #deleteSpotify is trending.

I quit Spotify almost two years ago, after I decided it was time to survey the other streamers and see what I might be missing. And when I spent a few weeks with Tidal I realized that I’d been missing quite a lot. But more on Tidal in a moment. Let’s consider the market dominating Spotify first, because it sucked before Rogan came along.

Spotify was of course the first mainstream digital streaming service that really worked. It had a vast catalog and a slick interface, so for most of us it was the first service we signed up for. And it does what it purports to do, in the same way that supermarket chicken is chicken, with all the guilty-making facts behind it hidden from the consumer. For one thing, Spotify is majority owned by the three major music companies that dominate recording and publishing, so the very companies that signed hundreds of thousands of artists to record deals that disadvantage them in the streaming environment are keeping the bulk of Spotify’s $9 billion in gross annual revenue. When artists, particularly legacy artists, cry foul over their tiny Spotify checks, remember their label, likely a Spotify co-owner, is keeping most of their royalties for themselves in a fox/henhouse kind of situation.

I grew annoyed years ago when I realized how much Spotify was spending on marketing and pumping up the major label star system at the very time when indie labels and artists were struggling hard with the transition from CD-based income to the new streaming economy. A billboard on my avenue into downtown Nashville almost daily touted new music by Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift or Luke Combs. Yes, yes, we know. Why is my music streamer advertising how cool they are? Get over yourself, I thought. You’re a utility, like the water bill. Make the music arrive and make it easy to let me discover new stuff on my own terms. Enough with the patronizing glitz and taking revenue out of the artists hands to do so. This anti-ethos hit new lows when Spotify went huge in podcasting, throwing a reported $100 million at Joe Rogan for exclusive rights to his daily macho blah-blah-blah. This just feels like an insult to musical creators who already see Spotify not doing a thing to make their lives materially better.

Now Tidal isn’t some paragon of musical purity. They’ve paid podcasters and have exclusive content deals. The platform pushes the music of its co-founders and early R&B/hip-hop artist investors like Jay-Z, but only if you spend time on the home screen, which I never do. Once you start building a collection and playlists, your experience will be familiar, but with two big differences from Spotify. Tidal was a leader in high-resolution audio. Its minimum streaming bitrate is the equivalent of playing a CD, and many tracks come in 24-Bit / 192 kHz resolution. In my experience, with a high quality audio setup, the difference is meaningful and emotional. Thanks to a recent pro-consumer rate overhaul, Tidal in CD quality is now the same $10/month as Spotify’s lower rate stream, while the full resolution subscription is $20. The catalog is vast and on the rare times my searches have come up empty, mostly it turns out those artists or recordings aren’t on any streaming service. Even local indie self-releasing artists are on Tidal if they use one of the main distribution platforms like Tunecore. You’ll find what you’re looking for.

As songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jake Blount pointed out yesterday in a thread about quitting Spotify for Tidal, you can import your playlists so you won’t lose all those years of curatorial effort!

Jake Blount 🪕 @forked_queer

And look, they even have a tool that lets you import your playlists... tidal.com/import-playlist

But the two most persuasive arguments for Tidal for me are that they pay artists better and provide us users with far more information about the music and who made it. Artists payouts are complex, but rumors that Tidal pays way more than Spotify are verifiable. This assessment indicates Tidal paying almost twice as much per stream as Apple Music and three times as much as Spotify. And Tidal recently inaugurated a system whereby a portion of every premium subscriber’s fee goes directly to the artists we listen to, not into a general pool. This “fan-centered royalty” plan is novel and experimental, but I certainly want as much of my $20/month to go to the indie roots and jazz artists I love rather than stars I never consume.

Finally, I learn more at Tidal. When I first saw the depth of their artist credits I was blown away. The screen grab below shows just part of the credits onboard for Neil Young’s Comes A Time album, and every one of those side musicians and producers is linked to their other work (it’s not free or errors or omissions of course, but it’s pretty great). As I wrote recently in a long post about streaming design, this kind of access to credits gives the music fan a fighting chance at making connections and seeking threads of influence. Spotify doesn’t come close. If you want to go the extra mile, Tidal also interfaces with ROON, which I praised in another recent post for being a frictionless integration of playback, collecting, categorizing and exploration.

I dabbled with Apple Music and Amazon but found nothing special at all, and indeed collecting albums was especially awkward with both. Tidal is a small player that’s changed ownership and some critics say its future is uncertain. But I find it slick, effective, great-sounding and I feel like I’m doing something for creators - not labels - by being part of its world. And hey, there are some great Neil Young albums on there too. 

Hey, J.J. Cale played guitar on Comes A Time! Nice to know. Not all albums have such detailed credits, but many major releases do, and I find it invaluable.