TIDAL Reviews 849

I used Apple Music for around 6 years without a problem, but I decided to change to Tidal for their High Res content.

Firstly, I can say their sound quality is excellent, everything else is shockingly bad.

The family membership is £30 a month and you can only have one account streaming at a time which is a con as all other streaming providers allow multiple users to stream simultaneously.

Now we get to the app, there are constant playback issues, I’m currently having a problem where I can only listen to 4 songs and then it pauses on the previous song I played. I contacted their customer service and this problem has not been fixed. All I’m told to do is reset my password.

Do not use this company

Rubbish customer service could not change card details I had said I’ve deleted account and started again rang bank to confirm that it was active updated iOS all in one message.their reply was called bank to unblock card what rubbish I’ve now gone onto another streaming service………….avoid at all cost!

I had used Spotify for years and was tempted towards TIDAL for the superior audio quality. I listen to a lot of vinyl and sometimes Spotify would be noticeably lacking in detail to the point where some music wasn’t worth bothering with. The audio quality with TIDAL was indeed better (though only really noticeable with certain releases) but in every other aspect it was very poor.
It was like using a BETA version most of the time, linking it to my streaming player (Cambridge Audio) was hit and miss, I would often have for force a restart on my mobile in an attempt to get it to link, eventually it would work but next time it would be the same again. Downloads don’t work, if they did then they would disappear next time. This, constant buffering issues and never ending complaints from my family (I chose the family package) meant I gave up after a month and went back to Spotify.

I contacted Tidal support as I had listened to rather bizarre recommendations well outside the bounds of what I listen to normally, and the playlists had remained on my home page for quite some time. Blocking the artists had no affect and blocking the tracks was disabled in the UI. I was at a loss as to how to remove the content so better recommendations could be made by the algorithm, and so I reached out to their support team.

To summarize Tidal Support's response, I was told that these artists and playlists were curated by Tidal's editorial team based on my listening experience, and then was then guided to the block buttons which they've removed in the user interface which I had already shown them to be the case with screenshots.

Terrible support response, and unreasonable software design decision to tell their customers that no, you're not allowed to block our promoted tracks, and we are just going to ignore the fact that you've block this artist (I'm surprised that was even allowed, sorry future listeners when that happens too), and instead we're going to shove the Wiggle down your throat with a healthy splash of god aweful rap music, and if you don't like it you can leave.

So I've left. They can take their licensing money, I'll keep mine.

I have mixed listening experiences, the sound quality can be the best with great recordings, and worse with poor quality recordings, this goes for all sources of playback, whether is from a CD player , a vinyl record , these rules apply to everything. I just hope that everything available music wise in Tidal would the best quality possible , for instance music from the eighties, as U2 sounds awful, I have followed this band from their early days living in Manhattan, now trying to revive those feelings I had of them i could have not been more disappointed when I played their music in Tidal ; perhaps remastered recordings should used or SACD to match the quality of the original master tapes , i don’t just listen to music for the sake of hearing just music , I listen to music of the best quality to compensate for the cost of pricey tubes of and the price of the electricity that takes to use expensive tube amplifiers !

It may be a little expensive, but it has good sound quality.

Also the size of the song library is enough for me.

And I love the UI/UX so much.

Lightweight electron web player is great.

Had to cancel as it is not compatible with Alexa in the UK. They should really look into that.

Looking at other reviews, I'm actually surprised you received a response to your query, I didn't. In the end I got tired of waiting and trawled round the web for a fix and it solved my problem. All they seem to be interested in is taking your money every month. If Spotify was high res, I'd be off like a shot... One day. I notice this profile has not been claimed so I'm guessing they are not even aware of all the negative reviews. Good luck if you have a problem, but I have to say there are a lot of helpful people out there on forums who have most of the answers.

Very dissapointed by their poor service and even worse app (if desktop or mobile app still same crap). Need to restart every few hours as it just stop playing and you need restart the app due to some kind of red error message or just like that it stops without any reason. It's like this for more than 2 years with no change. Even as I have Tidal for free from my family (as family member) I'm just going to pay for another service by myself as this is really terrible experience.

The curation of the library is just laughably bad. And Tidal know it - it has been flagged in countless reviews and customer feedback since they first started out years back, and they have done *nothing* about it. Why? Because the revenue is generated by mass market RNB and hip hop, and the rest they care not about.

Want a random example? Search for Faustus. One are a progressive death metal band from Sweden, the other are an English folk music duo. On Tidal, they are the same band. But this is NOT an unfortunate one-off, it is Tidal standard of curation for anything that isn’t contemporary RNB or hip hop.

Conversely, countless artists/bands are doomed to existing in multiple parallel incarnations. Not just with and without “The” in the name – I’m genuinely surprised that Beatles and The Beatles are not two bands on Tidal; one and the same band will have different albums/tracks under different entries with the *same* name. You have to bookmark both. And don’t even think of searching by composer. Fancy searching for a fugue by Bach? It’s not hip hop bruh, tough luck.

This may seem just utter contempt for their costumers - until you realise: in all probability they can’t actually work out the streaming royalties of the “minor” artists either. If I play Faustus, which Faustus do they pay: the death metal guys, or the English folk blokes? But of course they are corporately “deeply passionate about working with artists”.

Add to this that major works will disappear overnight - your bookmarked album is “no longer available”. And that artist info entries on Tidal have hyperlinks to albums that are not available on Tidal.

I want to like them but I just can't. I have an issue listening to music on my Samsung soundbar as well as the Samsung tv app. I contacted support and they requested logs from my phone and videos of the problem, so I did. They came back and said:

"Thank you for providing us with all of the information we requested, and for your continued patience while our developers attempted to diagnose this issue. After thorough investigation, our development team is unable to reproduce this issue and we don't have a fix at this time.
It appears this issue may be related to your device and we suggest reaching out to your device manufacturer Samsung for further assistance."

I fully disagree with them that it is a problem with Samsung itself, Spotify works flawlessly on both devices as well as other apps. I have written back to them to not give up trying to resolve this issue and may update this review if they resolve it. Good thing I'm only on the trial version

Their software is worse than the worst iTunes; it takes ages to load whatever platform you are on or how powerful your computer is. The sound quality of the music is good in most cases.

Tidal itself is great.
However, the customer service (Pablo in this case) is completely incapable or unwilling to understand the situation. For that reason, I ended up with a close ticket without a proper answer and/or solution. For that reason, all stars deducted as it shouldn't be the case to leave a customer hanging, while the fix would have been so extremely simple.

Will continue to use TIDAL as the service itself is fine, but will certainly keep the terrible customer support in the back of my mind.

Update February 2025:
The integration with Waze has now discontinued rendering Tidal pretty much useless to me, since that's where I mainly used it. Such disappointment. Back to Spotify it is, I'm afraid.
Reached out to support as well about this, but to stay in the same trend as the original review, their customer support was again pretty useless. I asked them a question twice, and twice they dodged the question and eventually closed the ticket unanswered. This time Diego instead of Pablo.

Very unfortunate, that the money made for their service clearly doesn't flow towards UX and CS.

Tidal is ok for hi res music streaming, particularly now as they have an alternative music format to MQA with hi res FLAC files.

BUT...£19.99 A MONTH! REALLY? I Can get Qobuz for about £10 per month for paying a year upfront (Tidal don't offer this option). Any difference in sound quality between Qobuz and Tidal is minimal at best (and in reality it comes down to personal choice). So, yet again, tonight I considered subscribing to Tidal, but at double the cost of 12 months of Qobuz I'm saying a firm NO. My rating is based on cost for the most part, as the sound quality from Qobuz is easily as good as Tidal and in my opinion better on some albums.

Please note.... if you have any hifi equipment that runs the Bluesound, Bluos, software it will not currently play the Tidal HiRes FLAC files, only MQA. Apparently there are discussions going on but there's currently no resolution in sight. Qobuz already plays hi res files (24 bit 196khz) through Bluos.

Offer a 3 month trial for £1 then after taking all your details and creating an account, only gives a one month trial

Still no response from this company on how they manager to fraudulently obtain my bank details the charge a subscription fee for something that I would never sign up t

Tidal really need to get their act together - nothing works smoothly. Free trial started ok. Took up offer of £2 for first paid month before starting to pay the full subscription rate but then all went pear shaped I cannot sign in on the app. I cannot alter the sound quality. I have tried reinstalling etc etc but no joy.They are quick enough to take your money though.

I had a terrible experience with Tidal. I had a free trial to see if I liked it and cancelled the membership before the trial ended, yet I was still charged €19.99. I contacted their support and they said I'm not eligible for a refund because I didn't cancel before the billing date. Once again I told them that I did and I got the same answer again. Horrible service.

I changed my email address on my Tidal account a few months ago, and discovered later that I have been charged twice. After talking to customer service, I realised that they kept the old email address and created a second account without my consent. So now, I am been charged twice and they don't want to give a refund when clearly they made a "mistake". Worst customer service ever, and a scam.

If you listen to classical music or likely many double or triple discs avoid using this company. Too many albums appear as all track ones followed by all track twos and so on. So if you were listening to a triple album you get 3 track ones, 3 track twos. No easy way to report this to get it sorted out.