Tidal and Apple Music are both leaders in music streaming. To say the least, the Tidal vs Apple Music battle is a tight one. While Tidal has cheaper pricing options and offers artist-centered service, Apple Music has some cool features that you can’t get with Tidal.
In this article, we’ll compare and finally answer the ultimate question: “Is Tidal better than Apple Music?”
Tidal
Tidal is most well-known for its celebrity founders like Jay Z, Deadmau5, Madonna, and other big names. These founders wanted to create an artist-first platform. Let’s see which weapons Tidal has to offer.
There’s an interesting reason why Tidal was sold, you can learn more about it here.
Tidal Free Trial
Tidal has an amazing free trial. It’s offered free for 30 days and gives you access to their extensive library of music, movies and podcasts.
Cost
The price of a basic “HiFi” plan is 9.99$, while “HiFi Plus” is 19.99$ per month, with a 30 days trial. The cherry on top of Tidal’s cake is a 50% discount on HiFi and HiFi Plus plans for high school and college students.
Features
Tidal offers 80+ million songs and exclusive releases you can stream on their platform. Both subscription plans are ad-free and available for listening offline. From HD videos to artist radios, all-new surround sound music formats, to Tidal Connect streaming, Tidal has continuously added new features to improve its service.
Benefits For Artists
Tidal is known for its Direct Artist Payout Program that helps artists earn more. With a HiFi Plus subscription, 10% of your money is directed to the artists you listen to the most. Tidal pays roughly 0.0128$ per stream and offers the possibility of buying artist’s merch which additionally benefits the musicians.
Apple Music
The Apple Music service was created by the tech behemoth behind iPhone, iTunes, and more. Let’s see what cards they play in the Apple Music vs Tidal game. Is Tidal better than apple music?
Cost
Apple Music is the same price as Tidal, with a basic individual plan for 9.99$ and a family plan for 14.99$. They recently added a new subscription option called “Voice,” which can be used only with voice control, for 4.99$ per month. Apple Music also offers a student plan which costs 4.99$ a month, and they offer 30 days free trial for most of the subscriptions.
Features
Apple Music offers 90 million songs more than 30,000 playlists, and with some of the subscription plans, you can download 100,000 songs to your library. Apple Music also offers regularly updated personalized playlists and live or on-demand radio stations hosted by artists.
Apple currently offers lossless audio, read more about that here.
One more cool feature is that if you have a device that supports Siri, you can ask her to play anything from the Apple Music catalog, find songs by lyrics, add music to your library, and more.
Benefits For Aertists
Apple Music recently announced they pay artists 0.01$ per stream. This value varies by subscription plan and country or region. On average, Apple Music pays $0.00599265 per stream across all countries. Only the top 23 countries receive $0.01 or more per stream when combining master and publishing rights.
Conclusion
If we sum up the facts, there is no real Tidal vs Apple Music battle winner.
Tidal might be better than Apple Music because it’s cheaper and pays artists more revenue.
However, Apple Music has a broader music library than Tidal and offers some great features such as voice control and personalized playlists.
Since both services have their benefits, the choice is ultimately yours, and it depends on what features you prefer and how much you are ready to pay for streaming music.
Want to know how Tidal compares to other streaming services? Read about how Tidal and Spotify compare here.