Indie SMH Entertainment recently ran a week-long study between TIDAL and Spotify to find out which music streaming service was best for their latest project, When Music Worlds Collide.
After weighing the pros and cons of both sites, the album’s producers, Johnathan Hay and Mike Smith, announced on Siriux XM station Shade 45 that TIDAL was the better option for their product. The duo also expanded on their reasoning with Billboard.
Despite being initially “skeptical” of TIDAL, the streaming site’s HiFi capabilities along with Roc Nation’s customer service ultimately pleased Hay.
“TIDAL added that little tiny bit of extra brightness – a more rounded bass, made the mid-range a little crisper and crystalized the sound to perfection,” Hay told Billboard. “Unfortunately, these details are stripped out of a song when the music is compressed into a lower quality file. We [as producers] didn’t invest all our time and resources into our music for it not to sound right. It’s all about the details.”
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When SMH reached out to Spotify and TIDAL to notify them they were conducting this “challenge,” only one site responded.
“We weren’t expecting either to contact us back,” Hay said. “So, I was surprised when Roc Nation contacted me about the criteria for our challenge. I explained our concept, and asked them to listen to our album. We got great feedback from them about the album, and then they featured it on their homepage under New Releases. Jay Z has put it out there that TIDAL is about helping independent artists. We can say firsthand that’s true.”
Smith agrees that TIDAL is best for new and independent artists, but he says Spotify’s app has the upper hand.
“It’s hard to beat some of the functionality of Spotify’s app,” he says. “Every song you have ever played remembered in a very long playlist starting with most recent down to first played. I love this feature because I tend to binge listen and this makes it easy for me to go back to my list of the day. And it is very intuitive in analyzing the songs you listen to and recommending artists and songs for you.”
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SMH Entertainment’s When Music Worlds Collide is available now.
For more TIDAL coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
