Joining a growing trend of rising rates in the competitive streaming services market, Tidal, “the artist-first, fan-centered music streaming platform”, is starting to slowly increase (so you can barely notice) their plans.
As noted by Billboard, the monthly pricing in America and other markets increasing by $1 a month for the basic HiFi plan, and the Family play (up to six accounts on one plan) offering is now $3 higher.
Following suit with Tidal’s competitors Apple Music and Amazon Music, Tidal is the latest of most streaming services to increase prices.
Being in the rearview compared to the market share of the others, Tidal is said to have one upped the competition by boasting a higher bitrate which translates to a better sound.
By sustaining the plan with advertising, Tidal’s free option has the capability to play tunes at around 160kbps while the HiFi plan peaks at 1411 kbps.
When you to pay to play with HiFi, listeners also have better features like blissful ad-free streaming, live events capabilities, and offline listening options.
The only plan not affected, for the time being, is the up-market HiFi Plus plan which far and away beats the other plans with its ability to ramp up the kbps to 9216 with the use of the MQA code.
This is the format you must try out, according to music aficionados, to listen to music or content Sono’s 360 Reality Audio format or Dolby Atmos although it’s not 100% clear that it makes a difference.
With the new price hike, the only other cheaper alternatives are currently YouTube Music and Spotify which are a dollar less in comparison.
For Spotify, however, that might not last for long as it has been reported that the music platform is ‘ready to raise prices’.
Out of all music streaming platforms, only Spotify announced official usage numbers which displayed a first quarter 2023 close with out of a total 515 million subscribers, roughly 210 million premium subscribers.
Tidal has always differentiated itself from other streaming services but perhaps the new pricing is coming from new ownership of the Block (previously Square) for almost $300 million back in March 2021.
