If you haven’t seen it yet… TIDAL Pricing | TIDAL
Looks like ad supported free tier and two lossless tiers, of which one includes mqa and surround stuff.
Most interesting thing about the top tier is how $2 of your sub goes directly to artists instead of labels.
My Tidal App has upgraded this morning and shows two subscriptions: HiFi and HiFi Plus.
I live in Spain.
HiFi: 9,99 €/month
HiFi Plus: 19,99 €/month
I guess that the HiFi subscription could be lossless 16 bits / 44,1 kHz, no hi-res.
Similar pricing in the UK (notwithstanding non-existent discount for currency) - £9.99 for HiFi, £19.99 for HiFi Plus.
No sign of an ad-supported free tier though.
So one of the big questions is, what files are streamed on the Hi-FI tier for music that’s previously been available only in MQA? Has TIDAL reinstated the redbook CD quality FLAC that used to be available or will you receive a non-unfolded MQA FLAC?
This looks like what they were trialing in Australia and there is a post on here somewhere where someone ran a test and found they were being served downsampled MQA.
UK pricing for Family looks the same as it was, no changes. £14.99 & £29.99.
Yes I just checked and it has not changed at all in the UK
You don’t need to downsampled MQA, you just present it so it cannot be unfolded, ie 16/44. 0f course you could MP3 that file also…
This pricing model is the certain death of 3D, 360 degrees, MQA, Dolby in the mass market. Tidal is countering Apple and Amazon with this without upsetting Roon’s HiRes customers. There is now one more pricing model there.
For every billion people with media use (MP3, OGG or AAC), there is only about one tenth of a per mille HiRes use.
About half of all users pay nothing and endure advertising. The other half is again half with the market leader with OGG320.
They are only in a hurry with HiFi rates when customers start to migrate. At the moment, Google is growing the fastest and does not have a HiFi tariff either.
Apple has started a price and package offensive after the demise of iTunes, Beats and hesitant services marketing (Music/TV…). So far, these services did not even ignite on their own devices.
This has frozen the price level and only here in our niche will find customers who have always used multiple services and also paid more.
Of course, the 2$ or € for artists marketing in the bubble “up to…” and the catalogs with good HiRes productions are rare.
Yes-auto’upgraded’ here in the UK, think it’s pretty much the same service (I paid £19.99/month anyway), but I do like that (up to) 10% of my sub goes to artists I play the most!
Even though I use Tidal, I still buy music-so I’m pleased one of the services has begun to address the poor level of artist payments.
I just recently renewed Tidal Hifi under the Best Buy plan pricing. Today I got an e-mail that Tidal has upgraded me to the Hifi Plus plan at no additional charge. So I still get Plus for the same $10/ month I paid under the Best Buy deal. That’s nice, I guess, except I would be perfectly fine with the new Hifi plan if I were signing up today.
Anyway, $10/mo. is now the commodity price for CD quality streaming. Yet another poke at Spotify and their apparently abandoned hifi plan.
Yep. Got the email notification from TIDAL this morning with my account upgraded to TIDAL HiFi Plus. I also got mine with Best Buy for $99. Renewal would be $119. I have been TIDAL customer for 6 years already.
nice news, very welcome! looking forward to the app update … havent’ been using the Tidal App really, since I use Roon with Tidal for home listening and Spotify on the go… but the latter might change!
I just downgraded to normal Hifi tier and only paying $4 a month. (price based on region I guess)
It’s a great option for me especially when I’m paying for Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Roon. Only keeping Tidal for an integration at this point.
For those Roon and Tidal subscribers who have had their Tidal subscription upgraded by Tidal, either from “Premium” to “HiFi” or from “HiFi” to “HiFi Plus” please make sure to change the Tidal streaming quality settings in Roon in order to ensure that Roon streams Tidal at correct quality.
Under Settings → Services → Tidal → Edit → Streaming Quality → either “Master” (when going from HiFi to HiFi Plus) or “HiFi” (when going from “Premium” to “HiFi”)
After that Roon should be streaming Tidal at the correct quality. You can verify the streaming quality by clicking on the little glowing “Signal path” dot in the now playing area at the bottom of the main Roon screen.
I’ll definitely give HiFi a try to see what comes out of the spigot. Have been happily rooning along for months with only Qobuz.
I wonder if there’s a new version of the deal Tidal had with Plex. I dropped PlexPass along with Tidal, and it would be slightly nice to get it back.
“Innovative Audio Formats”
The marketing has gotten thick at Tidal. When Tidal cannot agree with MQA on what MQA stands for, or even what should be capitalized, it makes me wonder if the love for MQA at Tidal is waning?
I like the “Fan-Centered Royalties” idea. I hope they can work it out. There are also some rumors that some of Dorsey’s technology (Square payment technology) will be behind the fan to artists connection. Hopefully, that can be pulled into Roon and not be a “Tidal app only” thing.
Anyway… all very positive. I think I’ll keep my $20 a month sub and see how all this plays out.
This is really interesting. It was time to disrupt the streaming royalties system and the aggregation approach that benefits everyone apart from the artists.
Tidal set for a bright future with this. I expect we’ll see more Tidal artist exclusives (especially with big releases etc.) as result.
