Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music
So Apple bought Beats Music and started their own streaming music service. Many people I know seem really excited by it, and being a paying subscriber on Spotify and Tidal, I was curious to find out if it was going to be better, and how.
Now, as music goes, I do appreciate good sound — I am a head-fi enthusiast after all. On the go, my Sony NW-ZX2 Walkman and Dita The Answer (Truth Edition) IEMs keep me entertained. At home, I have a pair of Fostex TH900 closed-back headphones hooked up to a Resonessence Labs Herus DAC/amp using my iPhone/Macbook Pro as the transport.
Most of my listening is done offline, more out of convenience than the desire for playback to be done without the processor handling an incoming stream in the background. Spotify delivers my music as 320 kbps MP3s, while I have Tidal set to HiFi, which is believed to be 16-bit lossless FLAC.
Thing is, it’s important to realise that the container (MP3/FLAC) is only as good as the source recording. Crap recordings can only sound terrible on good systems.
So, with that in mind, I downloaded and installed iOS 8.4, signed up for an Apple Music trial, and promptly turned off auto-renew so Apple wouldn’t be able to take my money the way HBO NOW robbed me of all my iTunes credit.
And boy, was I unimpressed.
First off, the music quality — played off the crappy iPhone 6 Plus speakers, Apple Music was nowhere close to the quality being put out by Tidal, or even Spotify. But back to back, Tidal outperformed Apple Music clearly (pun intended)
As far as curation goes, I’m not a fan. Not at all. I don’t really care what other people like listening — I know what I like, and that works for me. Same goes for discovery.
So that leaves me with variety — Tidal’s catalog isn’t as far reaching as Spotify, as far as my personal playlists are concerned. I’ve tried to set up similar playlists on Tidal and simply haven’t been able to find more than 80% of my tracks on Tidal that already exist on Spotify. On the other hand, Apple Music seems to be closer to Spotify, but given that the latter delivers superior quality for the same price, I don’t see the point of subscribing to Apple Music.
