INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Choosing the best music streaming service for your needs can be a little tricky; while streaming is still relatively new in the grand scheme
of quality, the platform was acquired in 2015 by hip-hop star Jay-Z, becoming the first major music service to be owned by the artists
though; both Spotify and Tidal offer different user experiences, pricing structures, and music catalogues
can even get Premium and access to mindfulness app Headspace under one discounted plan
Students get Headspace access as part of their Premium package.If there are a few people in your household that want to use Spotify, you can
save money by signing up to a Spotify Premium for Family account, which allows up to six people to connect to Spotify at one time (if you
Shutterstock.com)User interfaceOne of the reasons that Spotify is so popular is down to its easy-to-use interface
The tile system is just small enough to make selecting new albums and playlists easy while packing in plenty into a timeline of content
recently played songs and more
find curated playlists, recommended albums, and charts on your home screen
Search generally isn't terribly smart - misspell an album or artist name even by one character or one piece of punctuation, and you'll be
A bit of optimization here wouldn't hurt, but as long as you're careful you won't have any problems with it.Saying that, Tidal does boast
largely the same, so you can get it on devices that run iOS 11 and higher, Android 5 and higher, macOS, and Windows
artists, through curated playlists like New Music Friday acting as a launch pad for fledgling artists to break through into the big
playlists for almost every musical sub-genre
personalized playlists based on your listening habits, which is a fantastic way to discover new music, as well as revisiting some of your
entire discography on the streaming platform these days (thank goodness).(Image credit: Tidal)Some of the artists who are absent from
algorithms enough information to serve you truly exciting recommendations.Aside from these personalized recommendations, Tidal also
signposts the most popular playlists and releases on its service, as well as mood-based playlists, and the Tidal Rising section, which flies
having spent over $200 million to acquire two podcast production companies in 2019.(Image credit: Spotify)Audio qualityIf you subscribe to
Spotify Premium, you can choose between three sound quality levels: normal, high and extreme
When using the mobile and desktop apps, Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis
This was a semi-popular format a decade ago, and Spotify continues to use it because it's open source
Spotify doesn't have to pay a license fee for it.At Standard setting, music streams at 96kbps, which sounds a lot better than MP3 at 129kbps
Switch up to the high quality setting and the bitrate bumps up to 160kbps
The extreme setting uses 320kbps, which is perceptually close to lossless
range of sound from recordings that have been mastered from better-than-CD quality music sources, a sound that closely replicates the
quality that the musicians and engineers were working with in the studio at the time of recording.The increased bit depth of HRA improves
the dynamic range, basically giving you a greater breadth of things to actually hear from the recording, making tracks sound more detailed
in quality if you make the upgrade to higher resolution audio.TakeawayChoosing between Spotify and Tidal largely comes down to whether you
the same (though only Spotify offers a free service).Spotify does win out in terms of its interface; while the two platforms are pretty
