Is Tidal in trouble?

By the way, just to be clear, I said “worth less,” NOT “worthless.” :grin:

More woes if true…

It sounds pretty well sourced. I’m loving and using Tidal more than ever and also a big fan of MQA.The combination of Tidal, Roon, and Kef LS50W is just amazing.

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There are signs Tidal is in big trouble. Additionally, the service itself is vastly inferior to Spotify in every way with the exception of the lossless/ masters tier. Yes that’s a big difference for us, but not for many others. In my opinion it is when- not if they fold.

I really hope integration with other streaming services are on Roons radar as Roons value is diminished without a major streaming integration.

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The spell trouble for MQA as it now primarily relies on Tidal Master to stream its contents. For Roon, this will mean it has to look elsewhere to integrate new streaming services and it may not be so easy.

I hope the best for Tidal.

If Tidal does fold and there is no other service provider I will be off back to LMS so I can at least use Spotify, Deeezer or Qobuz.

A lot of the FUD about Tidal seems to be coming from one Norwegian publication “Dagens Næringsliv” that has a battle going on with Tidal. They reported the 6 month’s of cash left story in December and are now behind the latest story about royalties not being paid on time. Would be nice to see other corroborating sources before sounding the death knell.

That said, I don’t see how Tidal makes it. The business model here relies on huge volumes - a la Amazon - and even Spotify is struggling to get to profitability. They are inching their way there but who knows. If they can’t get there, who can? (only Apple can eat losses to ensure ecosystem cohesion).

Well I’m not a big fan of Spotify’s audio quality . I guess I would go with Deezer . I hope Roon is working diligently to add Deezer

Tidal was originally Norwegian and it is a collection of Norwegian artists who are threatening legal action over royalties allegedly paid to stakeholders in the company so I can only presume their interest is because they see Tidal as being close to them. I remain largely unconcerned about what is going on because of the lack of a reaction from elsewhere. Particularly the US where a major mobile communications company has a major interest in Tidal.

This is a long thread. I apologize if this came up before and I overlooked it.

If Tidal (or any streaming service) were to go under, would there be a way of still looking at all the artists and albums one connected to their library in Roon? Thanks to Roon’s metadata connections I’ve found dozens of artists and albums I’ve never heard of. So many I don’t even remember them all. If Tidal were to go belly up, I’d like to get a dump of my Tidal collection so I could follow up and buy some of those artists directly. I’d miss out on so many of them if I lost that content though.

Take an XL dump of your library or just the Tidal albums any time.
Just focus on Tidal, select ALL and export to file.

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If Tidal folded I would have to sadly reevaluate all software music players and hardware streamers that I am using. I would consider selling streamers and consider moving to a small fanless computer that I could control through my phone.
Would it sound as good? Possible not .

I would stick to Audirvana for music playing

The interest of a currently not really profitable mobile telco in a currently not profitable streaming service may be less assurance than one wants … and who knows what becomes of those 30 % if the planned merger with the Un-carrier gets through…

I may have missed it but for those who like it the loss of Tidal could spell far more serious trouble for MQA :frowning: than ROON.

I can see ROON surviving as they’ll either partner with another streaming provider or will have a significantly reduced cost base and be able to charge a much reduced subscription price - assuming most of their current costs are associated with improving and maintaining integration with the streaming service.

But MQA is a different story with such a rocky road to date and I suggest Tidal is its only lifeline - even with its far from perfect implementation in terms of identification / ease of access. MQA’s income stream would surely almost disappear overnight!

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I still take my lead from what they have to say. Either that or we have people panicking and leaping from high buildings!
If Tidal goes, until there is an alternative I’ll dive back into my vinyl collection as well as my ripped and purchased files. Roon is a keeper for me and I was a Tidal customer long before finding Roon so it doesn’t alter my value of Roon.

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It’s wait and see - or for current Tidal subscriber: wait, listen and see - anyway. I simply wanted to point out that the Sprint investment could soon be of less importance. Could be … of course: I don’t really know.

Can you explain the steps to do this in more detail please?

Always worth a quick search in the knowledge base

https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_How_do_I_export_my_library_to_an_Excel_spreadsheet%3F

Just add a focus on Tidal and select all albums.

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It seems very unlikely to me that even if Tidal were to fail that it would just go away entirely. It would probably be merged with/swallowed up by some other entity, either a direct competitor or some larger company. Tidal may be small, but its users are willing to pay (unlike Spotify), so that should make at least the customer base valuable. I’m pretty confident that it’ll survive one way or the other, even if it should go under.

Having said that, let’s be a bit more optimistic here in general :wink:

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Interesting point and I agree about TIDAL lossless subscriber being valuable.

I wonder how many of the TIDAL subs are on the lossless plan?