Apple Music vs. Spotify Music vs. Tidal

Online Music streaming services are the most popular service for users to enjoy music. The most significant advantage of online music streaming services is that they provide an extensive library for users. The large library could let most users find the music they want to enjoy without extra costs as a subscriber. There are several kind of online music streaming services for the user to choose, including YouTube Music, Spotify Music, Apple Music, Tidal. Some of online music streaming services provide their services worldwide, but some of them only offer their services for local users. Then, how to choose the online music streaming service is a question for someone who needs one of them. Today, we will make a comparison between Spotify Music, Apple Music, and Tidal. Then, you can know them better before you subscribe to the service.

Subscription

Spotify Music provides Free and Premium subscriptions for its subscribers, which is the only option for subscribers who would not like to pay for a subscription. The costs of Spotify Premium subscription is $9.99 per month, and you can get 50% off for student membership. Meanwhile, Spotify also provides Premium Family subscription for Family subscribers at $14.99 with up to 6 Premium accounts. (All Family members live under one roof is required.) With the premium subscription, you have access to all the features provided by Spotify, including offline playback, premium audio quality, keep playlists, unlimited skips, and no ads interruptions.

Apple Music only provides one subscription for a customer, which is the same as Spotify that costs $9,99 per month. Besides, the prices of the Apple Music Family plan and student plan are also as same as Spotify Music. The family plan of Apple Music is available for up to 6 family members, but iCloud Family Sharing is required. This family plan is different from Spotify Music that you need 6 Spotify accounts to to register for a family plan and under the same address.

Tidal provides Premium and HiFi subscriptions for their online music streaming services, which costs $9.99 per month and 19.99 per month. Of course, Tidal also provides a family plan for customers. The price of the family plan is $14,99 per month for Family Premium and $29.99 per month for Family HiFi. Besides, Tidal provides discounts for a particular group of people. They give a 50% discount for students in some regions and a 40% discount for US Military and First Responder. Tidal Premium plan subscribers can enjoy Tidal music with standard sound quality, high definition music videos, and expertly curated editorial. For Tidal HiFi plan subscribers, they provide lossless High Fidelity sound quality, Sony 360 Reality Audio, and Dolby Atoms Music for them to enjoy Music on Tidal.

Audio Quality

All of those three online music streaming services provide high-quality music for their subscribers. In general, Spotify Premium, Apple Music, and Tidal Premium provide music for their users at the same audio quality level. Spotify music delivered in an Ogg Vorbis wrapper with quality up to 320 kbps, which is clearly good enough for most users. Apple Music doesn’t offer hi-res audio either, and its AAC codec is locked at 256 kbps. However, the perceived audio quality is pretty much the same as Spotify Premium since the codex is more efficient. Meanwhile, if you are a member of Tidal Premium, you will have access to Tidal music with quality up to 320 kbps. The audio quality is similar to Spotify Premium and Apple Music.

If you are not satisfied with the audio quality of those three subscriptions, you have an alternative choice that is Tidal HiFi. Tidal HiFi offers CD-quality 1411 kbps FLAC to its subscribers with MQA (Master Quality Assured) encoding. With the right music and listen to high quality, hi-res audio headphones, or stream to a higher music system, Tidal HiFi performs much better than others. The music sounds brighter, cleaner, and more realistic. Meanwhile, High-Resolution tracks on Tidal are signposted by a Master logo beneath the artist listing. The app offers rails dedicated to Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) albums and playlists, simplifying access.

Compatibility

Spotify users can access Spotify music through the app on the desktop, iOS (iPadOS) device, Android device, and the Web player on the browser. The compatibility is to cover most users’ devices. However, you will not access the audio quality of 320 kbps if you play Spotify Music via its Web player; you will only get the audio quality up to 256 kbps. Besides, Spotify is also available on PlayStation and Xbox game consoles, smart TVs, and Speakers.

Apple Music subscribers can only play Apple Music through its app or iTunes. The music app is available on iOS (iPadOS) devices, Android OS, and macOS Catalina or later. If your device does not support the Music app, you need to play Apple Music on iTunes. Of course, you can also play Apple music on your Apple Watch, Apple TV, Apple CarPlay, and Apple HomePod. Besides, you need to connect to a WiFi if you want to listen to Apple Music with higher audio quality, even your cellular connections are good enough. There is no option for you to override this by setting it manually.

Tidal users can access to Tidal Music through its web player and app. With the Tidal online web player, you can access the whole Tidal library and enjoy music with up to HiFi quality (CD-quality 1411 kbps FLAC). The master audio quality is not available on its web player; you can only have access to master quality on its app. The tidal app is available on various devices and platforms, including Audio systems (more than 65 kinds of devices supports Tidal), Smart TVs & Streamers (Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, etc.), Auto (Mercedes-Benz, Lincoln, Volkswagen, Apple CarPlay, and android auto), Mobile & Tablets (iOS and Android devices), Amazon Alexa, Samsung Gear, and Desktop & Laptops.

With the comparison between those three services’ compatibility, we can find that Tidal is the best one since it provides higher audio quality on its web player and supports more devices. Of course, you are able to enjoy music from all of those three services when you have your mobile phone or PC.

User Experience

Spotify is the best one when it comes to usability, especially its collaborative playlists and on-point new music recommendations feature. Meanwhile, you can invite your friends to contribute to your playlists, find what are your Friends have been listening to on Spotify via Facebook, and post songs to your Instagram Story. Its app is easy to navigate, and the overall app design is fine, though, with crisp graphics and text on a black background.

The overall design of Tidal is similar to Spotify, and it is easy to use. Tidal is much better on the personalized feature that the service actually know what the users are interested in, accurately showcasing albums and playlists of particular relevance.

Apple Music probably is the default music app for iOS users, which also available Android fans. It is the best choice if you have an extensive collection of music downloads. The downloaded tracks can be uploaded to the iCloud Music Library (up to 100,000 songs), and the audio quality will get upgraded automatically.

In conclusion, the user experience of those three services has its advantages with different outstanding features. It is hard to define which service provides the best user experience for subscribers since each subscriber has different needs of features.

How to choose between Spotify Music, Apple Music, and Tidal?

In general, all of those three online music streaming services are excellent services to enjoy music. If you are a fan of Apple, Apple Music is better for you since you can access it on all Apple products, and the price is lower when you choose Apple’s service bundle.

Spotify Music is famous worldwide, and you can enjoy music on it for free (lower quality and ads interruption). Moreover, Spotify provides features for you to invite your friends to contribute to your playlists, find what your friends have been listening to on Spotify via Facebook, and post songs to your Instagram Story. This feature is quite nice for young people to share music and playlists with friends.

Tidal is the choice for people who would like to enjoy music with better audio quality, of course, with higher subscription fees. Tidal provides HiFi and Master audio quality for their Tidal HiFi subscribers.

These three online music streaming services only allow you to download and offline playback music within its app. Today, we would like to introduce three tools to download and save music from Spotify Music, Apple Music, and Tidal.

Apple Music Converter

Apple Music Converter is a professional audio converter that enables you to convert Apple Music tracks to MP3, M4A, FLAC, AIFF, or WAV format at 10X faster speed. More importantly, this powerful music conversion tool keeps original audio quality and retains artwork and metadata (title, artist, album, year, track number, and genre) after conversion. Then, you can transfer the converted Apple Music audio files to any devices you would like to enjoy the music.

Spotify Music Converter

Spotify Music Converter is a simple yet powerful Spotify downloader. With no need to install the Spotify app, it is able to download music from Spotify and convert Spotify songs to MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV, or FLAC format at up to 10X speed with lossless output audio quality and keep ID3 tags after conversion. With Spotify Music Converter, you can easily backup Spotify songs on your local computer, enjoy Spotify songs on various media players, transfer Spotify music from devices to devices, etc. This software is designed with almost all the features as a qualified, even excellent Spotify converter.

Tidal Media Downloader

Tidal Media Downloader is a comprehensive audio downloader and converter for Tidal music. It lets you download and save unlimited Tidal tunes on the computer at up to 10X faster speed. You do not need to install the Tidal app on your computer, as this powerful media downloader can directly download Tidal music from the Tidal web player. Meanwhile, it supports keeping Hi-Fi (High Fidelity) audio quality after conversion for Tidal Hi-Fi users and Standard audio quality for Tidal Premium users. Besides, this program allows you to organize the output files by artists and albums as your needs and preserve the ID3 tags, including titles, artist name, album, etc.