So I've been using Tidal for 5 years now, and feel they run circles around Spotify in terms of curation. Their algorithms and curated tracks are better, and they steer away from the social/gamification features and lean in to artist-centric features. For example, they've had a "credits" feature since day one - you can look up the producer, guitarist, oboeist, etc of any song, and see what other work they've done. In terms of discovering new music, there is absolutely no comparison to being able to look up the actual human behind the track. I've discovered hundreds of bands this way.
In my experience, and the reason I left Tidal several years ago, is that they lean heavily into modern hip-hop, compromising relevancy for the sake of promoting "friends of the company" (Jay-Z, Beyonce, etc).
Spotify only lets you read a very reduced version of the credits of a song, and you can't click on the artist to see all of their work. On Tidal, the credits are much more extensive, and you can go deep down the rabbit hole of a producers work in one click.
More importantly though, Spotify doesn't directly link artists to bands they're in. For example, on Spotify, Billie Joe Armstrong is credited with his work on Green Day, but if you go to the Billie Joe Armstrong page, he isn't. On Tidal, each artist can also be broken down by their role on a project. For example, you can see just the songs that Paul McCartney wrote (turns out he wrote a track for Drake called Champagne Poetry in 2021... who knew). On Paul McCartney's page on Spotify he isn't even attributed to The Beatles
> For example, you can see just the songs that Paul McCartney wrote (turns out he wrote a track for Drake called Champagne Poetry in 2021... who knew).
Unexpected writing credits like this usually indicate sampling. In this case [0], Drake sampled a song [1] that sampled another song [2] that was a cover of a Beatles song [3].
I used Tidal twice, for a year or so each time, and I found that their recommendations were the best by far. But their app was so insanely buggy. On multiple different phones it would have to be force-closed and restarted about hourly. Usually it froze when starting a new song. The whole screen would be frozen and unresponsive. Now I use Apple music and the recommendations are garbage, and it also freezes frequently, but specifically only when I wake the app up from sleep.
Importantly for music discovery, Tidal make it relatively easy to browse by record label so if you're not listening to major label pop stuff you can pretty easily find a bunch of artists in a similar niche. If that is possible on Spotify they've made it hard enough to access that it might as well not have been there.
Last.fm was good, but inevitably went downhill when it was bought out. As they had to commercialise more and more from the early days as a uni project that became audioscrobbler, with a tiny userbase, they followed the standard Doctorow model of capitalist decline. They had a sweet spot a few years in when they had plenty of data flowing and they hadn't yet messed up their APIs. Right now I use it to log my listening but I'm waiting for the email that says I'll need to move my data elsewhere.
I would naively assume that both Spotify and Tidal pull that information from the same sources. Hopefully there is a web service. Not to take anything away from the first person who decided to, you know, actually tell us this information. At this point it should be table stakes for a music streaming service-indeed, it should be a legal requirement if you ask me.
Thanks, that's really surprising. Credits get into ownership and payment, and I assumed some group of authorities would have that on lock, and would have pooled all their data since it's sort of in their interest to do so. Silly me I guess!
Spotify just pays the owner of the song (typically a record label) so doesn't need to be concerned with who created it. But yeah, even then, it's surprising the Spotify credits are so poor. Everyone forgets about Ringo!
