Tidal vs Spotify in Pakistan: Which Music Streaming is better?

Tidal might be out of the top iOS apps, but with an estimated 3 million subscribers to the music streaming service, showing it is a legitimate threat to Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, Deezer and other services. Now, most of those accounts may be on free trial, but we can expect at least a third of those to stay on post-free trial, and with exclusive albums, early tickets and other incentives, we should expect a lot more in the long term from Tidal.

The issue Tidal runs into is Spotify’s massive growth, adding 15 million paying subscribers alongside 45 million active free accounts, which at any time might turn to paying customers.

With Spotify in such a dominant position in the market, it doesn’t need to incentivise its brand, it just needs to offer music at a cheap price. Spotify’s current price is $9.99 per month, the same price Tidal offers its LQ service for, with high quality costing $19.99 per month.

Even though neither has the advantage since Spotify and Tidal LQ option both run at the same quality, Tidal does appear more to audiophiles who may be able to tell the difference on the HQ for $19.99, albeit the user has to own a great set of headphones or some decent speakers.

Inside the two music streaming platforms, Spotify has plenty of mainstream and independent artists. It has added new features for indies to become more prominent, but Tidal is heavily investing in new talent for the music service with Tidal X offering 75 percent royalties and 100 percent ownership of the music.

Again, Tidal seems to appeal more to the artist than Spotify, who does not pay a lot with its ad revenue model and pays less than Tidal in terms of individual paying customer, due to some of those customers choosing the $19.99 per month package.

Tidal has not disclosed its rate per listen, but we expect it to be a better deal than Spotify.

What does Spotify offer better?

Well, it has a free version. That might not be the best incentive for customers wanting to pay for music, but for people just wanting to listen and create playlists, the free option comes with 30 second advertisements and is generally tolerable, although it can sometimes be a pain in long sessions listening to the same ad repeatedly.

Tidal is the winner for audiophiles and people wanting to spend money on music, but Spotify is for casual users who might want to keep their libraries even without an active account.