![]() ![]() ![]() And Dorogusker confirmed as much last month. In an email sent to subscribers in March, Tidal stated that it ‘still pays artists more than the others with HiFi Plus – we charge a little more so we can distribute more to artists’. In its defence, and actually to its credit, Tidal has made a big thing about it paying artists more than other streaming services do for their music. Now that Amazon, Apple and Qobuz offer hi-res streaming for between £9 / $9 / AU$9 (Amazon Music, if you’re a Prime subscriber) and £13 / $13 / AU$20 (for Qobuz) per month, however, Tidal’s subscription cost for hi-res is head, if not also shoulders, above the competition. Fast forward to just a few years ago though and that kind of fee was an acceptable premium to pay over the lower-quality streaming offerings at the time. Twenty years ago, the thought of paying £20 / $20 / AU$24 per month for unlimited access to all the world’s music in digital high-resolution quality might’ve sounded as far out as Marty McFly’s hoverboard featuring in the Argos catalogue. Without some sort of MQA decoder in your grasp, a Tidal HiFi Plus subscription is as useful as a kettle without water. “Hi-res FLAC files will be big,” admitted Dorogusker, “but we think the infra is ready, even on mobile.”įor hi-fi fans, accessing those MQA-powered ‘ Tidal Master’ streams on their system has involved owning MQA-compatible hardware – something that has been a point of differentiation for the service, and indeed a sticking point for owners of non-MQA kit. But now that bandwidth across networks has improved and streaming 24-bit FLAC is more viable ( Amazon Music Unlimited now uses it for hi-res streaming, after all), that is no longer an obstacle to overcome. As Dorogusker explained during the AMA, the MQA solution offered “a balance of quality and bandwidth” at a time when the two didn't massively go hand in hand. ![]() MQA side-stepped the issue of FLAC and other lossless formats requiring big file sizes that were hard to stream due to average bandwidth limitations at the time. Yep, when mass-market streaming services were offering low-bitrate streams five years ago, Tidal decided to offer better quality – and to achieve that, it used (and licensed) MQA technology, a method of digitally packaging and storing studio master recordings as files small enough to stream. ![]()
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