Tidal

$10 is peanuts considering how much I use it.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2015/03/30/tidal/

good for a dn

browser-based? oh dear that's a shot in the foot and no mistake. the auto-start soon as you switch the PC on is a big part of the appeal for me and i'm sure many others. sounds dreadfully lazy that but you know.. it's neat.

it's probably unfair to compare the 2 but the launch needed something more like this and less like a bunch of corporate stiffs signing pieces of paper.

http://c0248141.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/BDDC_06137_0048992A.JPG

I hate streaming with a passion.

― raih dednelb (The Reverend), Tuesday, March 31, 2015 5:53 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

streaming is dumb yeah

― deej loaf (D-40), Tuesday, March 31, 2015 5:54 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't hate streaming, but I do wonder what all the streaming champions are going to do when Spotify goes under.

Guys you know there isn't actually any difference, from the pov of the listener, between streaming an album and listening to it on MP3, right? Also RMDE at anyone cosigning that sentiment who has also made a Youtube playlist.

If Spotify does go down, it's not like music will suddenly become difficult to come by, nothing's going to vanish overnight. FWIW I still think Google or Apple or someone will buy Spotify before it goes down - why wouldn't they?

why's it going down??

MP3 in 320 and Spotify in 320 seems very different to me but i like things kinda treble-y and Spotify (for reasons that remain a mystery) has no graphic equalizer.

nothing's going to vanish overnight

apart from all your playlists and saved albums, which is basically an outsourced chunk of my musical memory (i don't have the spare braincells these days)(is there an easy way to export and save such data?)

between streaming an album and listening to it on MP3, right

everyone who uses spotify has a default must have a much better broadband provider than i've ever had (and how do you even do it while travelling?)

spotify is still pretty bad for being able to consistently listen to what i want to without having to switch back to itunes so i've never been remotely tempted. on the rare occasion i log in the adverts do my head in and the interface is clunky.

i had no idea until yesterday that it was in any way low quality sound though! who gives a fuck about that kind of audio fidelity outside of a bret easton ellis novel and/or scik mouthy

The interface is annoyingly clunky but on a decent broadband connection the streaming is fine. On mobile it's pretty much the best option there is for on-demand listening (you can download to your phone, but I wouldn't to that if I didn't have an unlimited data tariff). Anything I really like I make sure I have on MP3 anyway, I'd never rely solely on streaming and I suspect most listeners don't.

It's easy to take the piss out of things like yesterday's launch but surely any competition in this market is a good thing? The existing services are far from perfect and anything that encourages proper improvements is a good thing. The big problem I foresee is when services start battling each other for content and entire catalogues start disappearing from one service and reappearing on another. That'll probably be the beginning or the end because Spotify's big plus point is the size of its catalogue.

really thought exclusive content could've been a game-changer for tidal - if v annoying for the consumer - but no new rihanna album, no new kanye album, it's one thing to show your face at a launch and do a tweet but no one was really up for a step as big as that

how does spotify work when you're out of signal on your mobile? which is a lot of the time

I don't bother streaming on mobile, the interface allows you to download the album or playlist straight to your phone (either over wi-fi or mobile).

that sounds rubbish unless you've decided in advance what you'll want to listen to for your entire travelling time

You don't - you can do it when you're out and about, unless you're in a 3G black spot like the Tube or the middle of the countryside. I regularly download thing and listen to them on a whim throughout my commute, like every day.

no new rihanna album, no new kanye album

Can you elaborate on this, given that neither have been released yet? If they're not going to be on Tidal at all then that's ridiculous.

the tube, the countryside and aeroplanes are pretty large parts of travelling listening though. like great i have a 3hr train journey and spotify won't work.

(there was speculation that rihanna and/or kanye would release exclusive tidal-only material as part of the launch, i'm not sure how seriously anyone expected that but if it had happened it would've been pretty huge)

Also in what universe is the technology going to get any worse? In a few years' time there'll probably be full mobile data coverage pretty much everywhere. No one's advocating streaming to the exclusion of all else, but you're essentially using your lack of familiarity with the technology to justify your already-made decision that it's basically shit.

xp I'm about to take a three-hour train journey. I have around 1300 tracks downloaded to Spotify at 320-equivalent on my phone, including my rolling current tracks and current albums playlists. Around 300 of those tracks weren't on the Spotify database, so I dragged and dropped them from iTunes into the desired playlist positions within the Spotify desktop client. I almost never use iTunes to play music, because it's so straightforward to seamlessly integrate MP3s into Spotify playlists. If I use iTunes for playback, I've only got access to a minority of the music I might want to play. If I use Spotify for playback, then I can access all of it.

Seems insane to me that anyone could call this amazing technology 'shit.'

Also, yes, it seems insane to me that they didn't tie this in to some massive release(s) - how could they have been so blind with this? If the thing launched with the new Kanye people would be sprinting to sign up rather than laughing it off entirely

I actually think Spotify's library feature is terrible, I don't understand why they don't just lift that functionality from iTunes or any number of half-decent media players so that you only ever need to use one desktop player.

I hate streaming with a passion.

― raih dednelb (The Reverend), Monday, March 30, 2015 10:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

streaming is dumb yeah

― deej loaf (D-40), Monday, March 30, 2015 10:54 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why

― jaymc, Monday, March 30, 2015 10:57 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have spotty wifi and a weak data plan, plus I'm a dj and need mp3/wav to play out. Also I just intuitively hate it.

What's the difference between downloading via Spotify onto your phone for places with no signal vs. sticking to MP3s altogether so you don't have to do all that in the same situation?

If Spotify goes under we all have to use tapes again.

I don't really play music on my phone tbh.

Usually if I do it's hooked up to someone's stereo at their house or somewhere else, rather than on the go with headphones.

xp a) The Spotify option works out cheaper (although I still end up buying the stuff I love the most), b) The download-to-phone process is automatic - the phone just synchs of its own accord, to playlists pre-designated as offline, and it synchs extremely quickly. I used to hate faffing around with iPods.

I play music wirelessly from my phone all the time at home. The music goes through a Bluetooth-enabled DAC into a multi-room hi-fi. I've done comparative tests between the same tracks on the phone and on CD, and the difference is minor.

whats the difference between owning something & having to keep up payments to have access to it?

well, if you are broke or cant pay your bill you can still listen to the cd you own, the mp3 you paid for

but lets talk about what streaming really is: its a way to rebuild the music industry. Meaning: a way to rebuild the pooled money that enables investment in new artists and all the financial inefficiencies of the old system

charge me a buck for a song & everything is great. an artist could just put it up on their own website—business handled

do the artists get a better percentage here than from spotify ?

still totally depends on the deal between the artist and their label

That would be the only reason I would switch.

If you are going to support a music distribution service or moral terms or concern for artists, support BANDCAMP not Tidal.

an artist could just put it up on their own website—business handled

why spend money on artist websites when they/we can all use the same distributor?

Speaking to Billboard Jay Z said: "We didn’t like the direction music was going and thought maybe we could get in and strike an honest blow and if, you know, the very least we did was make people wake up and try to improve the free vs. paid system, and promote fair trade, then it would be a win for us anyway."

streaming is not going to replace owning a file or physical copy of a record for a lot of people with a lot of particular preferences and purposes. but streaming is pretty great when it suits you. i always dreamed of having a version of the iTunes store where i just pay a flat fee and can listen to everything on it, no 99 cents a song or anything. it's great. it suits my music listening needs more often than not these days.

it disappoints me that Spotify seemed to rush to be free and cheap and eager to please in the name of dominating the streaming market before anyone else could, because streaming was gonna be big no matter what and they set a low standard for pricing (and royalties for artists) that will be hard for Tidal or anyone else to go against. already i see a ton of people balking at $20/month for unlimited streaming like that wouldn't have seemed like an amazing deal 4-5 years ago (and still is by any reasonable standard).

^^ totally agree.

OTM but you could argue YT set just as bad a precedent in allowing totally free uploading and viewing. Knowing a lot of people would happily use YT just for listening as much as viewing meant they had to keep the price lower. No on-demand service to date has actually tried to charge much more than £10/$10 per month have they?

it disappoints me that Spotify seemed to rush to be free and cheap and eager to please in the name of dominating the streaming market before anyone else could, because streaming was gonna be big no matter what and they set a low standard for pricing (and royalties for artists) that will be hard for Tidal or anyone else to go against. already i see a ton of people balking at $20/month for unlimited streaming like that wouldn't have seemed like an amazing deal 4-5 years ago (and still is by any reasonable standard).

― some dude, Tuesday, March 31, 2015 7:27 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ totally agree.

― out here like a flopson (tpp), Tuesday, March 31, 2015 7:34 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

THIS

I'm old-fashioned, I guess, but I prefer to buy and own music I love.

Maybe I'm cheap or old-fashioned (most likely both) but $10 per month, let alone 20, is a lot for something that leaves me with nothing (except checking out music, which you can do freely in other places)

OTM but you could argue YT set just as bad a precedent in allowing totally free uploading and viewing. Knowing a lot of people would happily use YT just for listening as much as viewing meant they had to keep the price lower. No on-demand service to date has actually tried to charge much more than £10/$10 per month have they?

― nashwan, Tuesday, March 31, 2015 8:35 AM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's "we didn't start the fire" -- every corner of the music industry dropped the ball in a hundred ways since the advent of the internet for us to get to where we are right now.

precedent, it wasn't a precedent, it was a power move to move into an unexploited market space so that later they could start charging for all the shit people had become accustomed to thanks to the original illegal content used to get them accustomed to it

YouTube becoming an important portal for music, or even becoming a big deal at all, was kind of a freak accident. unlike Spotify, which set out to do pretty much exactly what it has done.

Yeah YouTube for music seems like a classic case of no one's ever able to fully predict how people use a technology

the problem w/ youtube for music is the tracks are always noticeably compressed, it's like going back to the old lower quality mp3s from the filesharing days

feel like we're getting close to the point where kids born in the 90s get nostalgic for the "warmth" of low bit rate mp3s.

VHS Hipsters on the march

honestly VHS was a stealth great medium for audio recording, you could make like hours-long mixtapes, it was a pretty wide tape too so the fidelity was good, i actually knew one professional recording guy that recorded to VHS some

pssshhhhtt, beta's where it's at mang