Only what, two years after Apple just bundled it in with their regular plan.
Nice one, Spotify.
At first, I was like “okay, delaying it two years just to release it the exact same way you were planning”, but it actually makes a weird sort of sense to me. Most people in their general user base won’t be blitzed with big news about comparisons because the two companies are no longer doing it at the same time. Making a comparison years after the fact won’t generate as much outrage. Out of sight, out of mind essentially.
Soon the only available free option will be 32kbps, 16kHz, mono, and it’s just a sound byte shaming you for not paying them.
This is probably a confirmation that Apple (or to lesser extent Tidal, Amazon and Qobuz) has siphoned away a fair number of Sportify subscribers who care about high quality audio. I’ll probably stick with Tidal although Spotify offers some really good features.
Thanks for name dropping tidal. I didn’t even know to existed. Going to give it a try
I’ve been pretty happy with Tidal. MQA gets a lot of criticism, but I have a DAC that decodes it and those re-mastered tracks sound great for the most part. They are moving toward lossless FLACs in addition to MQA. One thing that keeps me with Tidal is their support for play lists with basically unlimited numbers of songs (at least 10,000) - I have a “thumbs up” playlist that I have been curating for many years that is about 4,000 songs and Spotify in particular does not support playlists of that size as far as I know. Tidal also give more money per song to artists that the other companies. I believe Spotify is among the lowest per song, but they have many more users so probably pay out more in total.
