When UX triumphs over audio quality: The music streaming battle between Spotify and Tidal
The global on demand music streaming industry is projected to reach USD76.9billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 17.8% from 2020 to 2027 (Grand View Research, 2020). With more service providers enters the market and competes for our attention, music streaming has gone far beyond those simple play and stop button. Music today is about self-discovery, exploratory and community-building. Audio quality is no longer the sole interest that we are looking for.
It is little surprise when the latest market share reveals that Tidal, the world’s first global music streaming platform focusing on high fidelity sound, has yet to dominate the market.
In this article, we offer a glimpse into the competition between Spotify, the app long dominating the music streaming market, and Tidal, arguably the music streaming platform offering the best sound quality today, and how Tidal lost the battle with its sub-optimal user experience. Factors taken into consideration includes user experience and usability goals.
Remember, we are looking into the user experience goals of an average listener. He could be anyone — a driver on road in need of some perks-me-up, a professional working in office looking for some white noise background music, a cafe owner creating warm fuzzy vibe in his little space setup, a teenager singer-wanna-be. While he sometimes searches for specific songs, he really does not want to spend his time for all the songs that he might like. His first week's songs should be curated, and from the second week onwards, he is expecting the platform to know his taste in music.
Here's a summary of Spotify and Tidal's performance in meeting user experiences goals
In addition, Spotify has done well in several usability aspects when compared to Tidal.
The most critical feature (and most criticised by users in Tidal) is the search feature that is affecting the effectiveness of the music streaming app. After all, what can be more frustrating than spending extra time trying to search for a song for no results. In Tidal's case, a simple additional space could have yield no results.
While Tidal's search requires an accurate entry, Spotify's search is much more humane and forgiving - well, we all forget song titles sometimes. It searches from lyrics even, just in case you manage to only recall the chorus.
Spotify also goes one step further with its feature and caters more for utility for recommending similar pieces to the listener. While listening to Sanguisugabogg (a popular death metal group)'s Dead as Shit, Spotify leads the listener to other playlist related to the genre.
Based on both the user experience and usability goals, Spotify has definitely profiled the mass market of music listener well. It is built for a multi-tasking user seeking convenience, new music trends and a sense of community. Tidal, on the other hand, is probably for the niche user seeking extremely high music quality and audio experiences, who probably knows their music well to perform accurate searches and related searches. This explains Tidal's lack of momentum in capturing market share. Till we see someone who's better with discovery and search, Spotify is here to stay.
