Tidal — the music service whose goal was to actually pay artists while also providing a quality streaming product — is raising its rates a smidge, starting August 2023. As noted by Billboard, the basic HiFi plan is increasing from $10 a month to $11 a month. And the Family play is going from $15 a month to $17 a month.
As we write this, the changes have yet to be reflected on the Tidal website.
What it lacks in market share — it’s far behind the likes of Spotify and Apple Music — Tidal makes up for in terms of options for those who want higher bitrates and (theoretically, anyway), better-sounding streaming music. Tidal’s free plan pipes in songs at up to 160kbps and supports itself with advertising. The HiFi plan tops out at 1411 kbps, is ad-free, allows for offline listening, has live events, and lets you listen on supported high-end devices from Lumin, KEF, and the like. The Family plan gets you all that for up to six accounts on a single plan.
There’s also the high-end HiFi Plus plan — whose price apparently is not changing — which ramps quality up to a whopping 9216kbps thanks to the MQA protocol. It’s also what you’ll need if you want to listen to anything in Dolby Atmos or Sono’s 360 Reality Audio format. Whether any of that will actually make a difference to your ears is very much open to dispute, but at least it’s an option.
The price increase brings Tidal in line with the likes of Apple Music and Amazon Music for individual plans. Spotify and YouTube Music come in at the most frugal by one whole dollar.
Spotify is the only of the major services to officially release usage numbers. It closed the first quarter of 2023 with some 210 million premium subscribers and a total of 515 million subscribers overall. Tidal started out as an artist-owned service but in March 2021 was purchased by Block (known at the time as Square) for nearly $300 million.
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