Tidal vs Qobuz Music Streaming Services

I made a video on Tidal vs Qobuz:

Oh dear! Five or six mentions of a one off customer service problem, and an assumption that you can generalise from the particular. And no mention at all of one of Qobuz’s major advantages - access to booklets, texts and translations for most classical releases. Maybe your musical tastes are insufficiently broad for this to matter to you, but rest assured it does to others.

As far as the greater availability of albums on Tidal, this may still be true in the US, but it would have been helpful if you had strongly emphasised - perhaps in your title - that you were only interested in addressing a US audience. That way I could have saved seven and a half minutes of my life.

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LOL. That’s a real hot take emanating from a trash fire right there. Obviously, when one does a video, it’s from their own perspective, and not yours. Glad you liked it.

Well if it’s any consolation, I agree with you about MQA.

I think the catalog selection between the two has a lot to do with the type of music that you listen to. For me they are fairly comparable in terms of what is available. I have found a few more obscure titles on Tidal, but this isn’t a deal breaker for me.

If you are looking at them from outside of Roon, Tidal definitely has a better app/desktop experience. I wish Qobuz would invest a bit more in this, but since I consume most of my music via Roon this isn’t a huge deal.

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I have been using both for a few months and my DAC decodes MQA. I am at a point now where i think one of the services is superfluous as most titles are available on both. Tidal might have a very slight advantage ( although i do see more “track unavailable” messages with tidal) in Pop titles, Qobuz seems to have better choice with Classical.

Given that i am not a huge fan of the curatorial choices of Tidal’s home page and that Qobuz is 1/3 cheaper. That MQA is not really necessary with a decent broadband service and that Jay Z is a bit of a dick, I am going to drop Tidal in favour of Qobuz.

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Some titles appear in Tidal first and Qobuz a week or two later. The new Def Leppard box set is an example. Not a deal breaker for me, as I prefer Qobuz as a download store, and with the Sublime+ subscription, hi res downloads are cheaper than 16/44 downloads.

The booklet feature in Qobuz is also wonderful, especially on classical releases!

FWIW- while Jay Z may be the majority owner, Tidal is owned by other artists as well including Chris Martin from Coldplay, Arcade Fire, and many others: https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/203055651-TIDAL-Owners

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Yeah, I think Tidal recently raised their Hi-Fi plan to like $25. a month.

No they didn’t

In addition to the student discount shown in the screenshot that Ged posted above, TIDAL also offers a military/veteran’s discount, and a first responder’s discount. Not sure of the various details, but a search of their support site for discounts (at least from here in the US) is still showing all three.

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I’ve got the military/veteran’s discount and it’s $11.99 a month for HiFi.

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