Spotify Premium: Spotify Free: Monthly Price: $9.99 (or $4.99 for students or $14.99 for a 6-account family deal) Free: Annual Price: $99: Free: Library: More than 40 million songs. Free's eponymous 1969 follow-up expanded on their roots-based sound, incorporating rockers like Albert King's 'The Hunter' as well as muscular ballads like 'Lying in the Sunshine' into the mix. Part 1: Convert Spotify Music to MP3 for Burning Spotify Music. If you want to burn Spotify music to CD, then you should use Spotify to CD converter to download the Spotify songs to common audio formats, such as MP3, M4A, FLAC and more. Once you have this converted music, then you can move onto the second part. As you scroll through the Spotify app home screen, the 15 playlists on this page are all part of the biggest new capabilities for Free tier users: complete song control and unlimited skips. If you want the best sound quality, AAC (Apple’s native format) or Ogg Vorbis are much better than MP3 but aren’t as universally supported. At that time I was actively using both Apple Music and Spotify. Ultimately, I stopped using Apple Music because I didn’t need two services, and I like Spotify’s UI and recommendations better.

1. How Can Spotify Be Free
2. Best Use Of Free Spotify Subscription
3. Best Use Of Free Spotify App
4. Best Use Of Free Spotify Accounts
5. Best Use Of Free Spotify Music Converter
6. How To Best Use Spotify
7. Best Use Of Free Spotify Playlists

Spotify is the best way to listen to music in the world today. It's easy to use, has a vast catalogue of music from major and independent labels, and you can even take it with you in the car or on.

If you’re looking to get into music streaming, there are several ways you can go, but picking the right service depends heavily on what you want out of it. No two platforms are as different as Spotify and Tidal; where Spotify prioritizes social features and personalized algorithms, Tidal prioritizes sound quality and puts artists first.

Editor’s note: This Tidal vs Spotify article was updated on October 22, 2020, to improve alt text.

Tidal vs Spotify: Music discovery

Spotify and Tidal both have clean, dark-themed user interfaces.

Both Tidal and Spotify offer various music discovery features and enable browsing by genre, mood, activity and more. Additionally, whether you’re on Tidal or Spotify, you have access to a radio feature that makes it easy to discover music similar to what you’re already listening to. Both streaming services use algorithms to learn your music tastes and recommend songs, but the ways in which they do so differ.

Tidal creates up to eight playlists that focus on eight different genres that you listen to a lot and have saved to “My Collection,” called “My Mix”. If you only listen to three genres regularly, however, it only gives you three playlists. These update gradually, rather than on a weekly schedule like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. And, if you like the “My Mix” you’re listening to today, you can save it as a separate playlist that isn’t lost forever when the mix updates.

Spotify and Tidal share similar music discovery features, but Spotify takes it a step further with expansive playlist options that may be filtered by mood, genre, activity, and more.

Spotify’s algorithms create not only the “Discover Weekly” playlist, but a weekly “Release Radar” playlist, up to six “Daily Mix” playlists, and, every so often: special static playlists such as “Your Time Capsule.” The “Discover Weekly” feature collects data about your listening habits, and recommends songs from artists and genres that you like. “Release Radar” is a one-stop shop for newly released music from all the artists you follow on Spotify. “Daily Mix” playlists combine music you’ve been listening to a lot recently and similar songs, and is essentially the same feature as Tidal’s My Mix. Algorithmically designed static playlists are Spotify exclusives released every so often and not on a particular schedule. For example, “Your Time Capsule” was a playlist released for Spotify users in 2017, and it used recent listening data to create a playlist of music users would likely have listened to as a teenager.

Don’t miss: Best streaming services

Spotify has a “Charts” tab, which organizes the top songs all over the world by which country they came from. These playlists tell you if the song is new, on the uptrend, or on the downtrend. Tidal also has charts playlists, but there are fewer of them. On the other hand, Tidal has “Tidal Rising” where you can discover artists rising in popularity who Tidal’s curators have selected to feature based on the potential they see in them. Tidal Rising is a great way to discover new artists that are just starting to make their mark in the music industry.

Spotify has pretty much everything Tidal has and more when it comes to music discovery. In addition to algorithm playlists, both Spotify and Tidal have a smorgasbord of editorial playlists that are frequently updated. However, Spotify simply has more playlists for every genre, mood, and activity so there are more options to choose from, and many of these playlists serve a similar function to Tidal Rising by creating exposure for less popular artists.

Winner: Spotify

Tidal vs Spotify: Content

Spotify and Tidal both have clean, dark-themed user interfaces.

Both services offer music, that’s a given, but let’s see where Tidal and Spotify’s content offerings diverge.

Tidal has a larger music catalog, but Spotify’s is more niche

Tidal offers over 60 million tracks whereas Spotify has about 50 million; clearly both have a considerable amount of music. Some artists opt to release exclusive music only to Tidal, sometimes for months, before it is released to the rest of the world. On the other hand, some lesser-known indie music that can be found on Spotify may not be found on Tidal.

Spotify accepts music submissions from anyone, whether it is submitted through a third party distributor such as CDBaby or submitted directly to Spotify. For an indie artist to submit to Tidal, however, they have to submit it through a select few music distributors. If you typically only listen to relatively popular artists, this shouldn’t count against Tidal, but if you’re a fan of true bedroom pop, you may want to go with Spotify.

Podcast fans can get their fix with Spotify, but Tidal has videos

Spotify hosts a large selection of podcasts for all your educational and entertainment needs.

Tidal is focused on musical artists, and so it doesn’t offer many podcasts. With Spotify, you have access to a wide library of podcasts, and a few podcast-specific playback features such as a sleep timer and speed adjuster. However, Spotify doesn’t offer as many podcast-specific features as some of the best podcast apps out there.

Tidal offers over 250,000 videos, many of which are exclusive to Tidal users and which include music videos, filmed live performances, and movies and documentaries about music. Spotify doesn’t have videos, but some songs have short GIFs that display on the player screen during the song.

Tidal has a ton of exclusive artist content

Tidal is a streaming service for the artists. Not only does it pay its artists more per stream than Spotify, they also have in-depth credit pages which outline who contributed to the music and how.

Tidal also offers its members exclusive artist content. Tidal X is a program for Tidal users that includes exclusive access to live shows, meet and greets, livestreams, concert tickets, and more. Examples of Tidal X events were Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 and Season 4 fashion shows where over 500 Tidal members were allowed to attend and the events were live streamed for all other Tidal members around the world.

Tidal Rising is a program in which Tidal’s curators select artists rising in popularity who they feel have potential and offer them free support. Artists get professionally photographed, get their music placed on the front page of Tidal, are offered Tour Support, and more. Not only does this feature support musicians in a direct and tangible way, but it’s also a great way for Tidal users to discover new artists that are just starting to make their mark in the music industry.

Spotify has a few similar features such as artist playlists which an artist can make and then add to their profile’s home page, and the Concerts tab which lists the artist’s upcoming shows in your city. Additionally, artists can record exclusive Spotify Singles in Spotify’s studios.

Winner: Draw

Tidal vs Spotify: Streaming quality

If you’re looking for HiFi audio, Tidal is your friend. The Tidal HiFi membership offers four settings for streaming quality: Normal, High, HiFi, and Master Quality Authenticated (MQA). The Normal setting is designed to limit the amount of Internet data being used because streaming high quality files takes up a lot of data. Some users choose only to use the HiFi and MQA settings while hooked up to Wi-Fi. The High setting tops out at 320kbps and uses AAC files. The HiFi setting offers CD-quality lossless FLAC files, meaning they are 44.1kHz/16bit. Master quality audio files are 96kHz/24bit FLAC or WAV files. If a song is labeled as MQA on Tidal, it means that the artist authenticated it themselves, but not all songs are available in this high quality format. Additionally, in order to benefit from HiFi or MQA audio, you need to have good studio headphones.

Spotify also offers different audio quality settings, but the maximum streaming quality is 320kbps over AAC files, which is the same as Tidal’s High setting.

Winner: Tidal

Tidal vs Spotify: Pricing

Tidal is more expensive than Spotify but has higher quality audio.

Tidal offers two tiers for subscriptions. The cheaper of the two is Tidal Premium, which offers maximum 320kbps audio quality via AAC, a lossy file format. With Tidal Premium, you can access exclusive music, videos, events and editorial playlists. The more expensive Tidal subscription is Tidal HiFi, which is the subscription this article of Tidal vs Spotify focuses on. Tidal HiFi offers lossless, high bitrate audio files, Sony 360 Reality Audio, and Dolby Atmos Music in addition to everything Tidal Premium offers. Both Premium and HiFi offer family subscriptions which allow up to six accounts. A 30-day free trial is available for both Tidal Premium and Tidal HiFi. Tidal also has a free plan called Tidal Access but you can only access its live video channels and a few selected radios.

Don’t miss: Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium

Overall, Spotify’s pricing is cheaper, and there is a free version—something Tidal lacks. Spotify also has a 30-day free trial for Spotify Premium. If you want high bitrate lossless audio but don’t want to pay so much for Tidal, try Amazon Music HD.

Winner: Spotify

Tidal vs Spotify: Social features

The Friend Activity section on the right updates as your friends change the song they’re listening to.

If you want the ability to view your friends’ listening activity or playlists, Spotify is the way to go. Spotify has a Friend Activity section which displays the songs your friends are actively listening to along with the album or playlist they are listening from. Unfortunately, this section is only available on the desktop app for Spotify, not the mobile app. You can follow friends by searching their username or by linking your Spotify account with Facebook. However, if you don’t want people to be able to view your Spotify activity, you can always disable the feature that publishes your activity. You have the ability to save your friends’ playlists to your library and create collaborative playlists where multiple friends can add and remove songs. Spotify also has partnerships with Instagram and Tinder, so it’s easy to share your music tastes with people on these apps as well.

As for Tidal, the only semi-social feature is that you can share a song from the Tidal app to your social media profiles, which is also a feature in Spotify.

Winner: Spotify

Tidal vs Spotify: Extra features

Spotify Wrapped shows your end-of-year statistics

In December of every year Spotify releases Spotify Wrapped which is an animation of infographics outlining your listening statistics from the year. These stats include things like how many total minutes you spent listening to music, which artist you listened to most, and which countries your favorite artists are from. Once you’ve viewed your statistics, you can share a card with your top songs and artists to your Instagram Stories to prove to everyone that you have superior music taste.

Spotify allows you to play local files

If you still have MP3 files saved to your computer from the old days and want to be able to listen to them in the same media player as your streamed music, you should get Spotify. Tidal doesn’t allow any local file playback, which is a shame for listeners with vast libraries from the CD-ripping days.

On both Tidal and Spotify, you can download files for offline listening. Keep in mind that if you download a lossless FLAC file on Tidal, it’s probably going to take up a lot of storage space on your device.

Tidal and Spotify have easy car integration

Both Tidal and Spotify are compatible with Apple Carplay and Android Auto so long as your car has that functionality. These enable easier navigation of your music while in the car, but you shouldn’t use them while actively driving. Additionally, Spotify can be integrated with Google Maps and Waze, and Tidal can be integrated with Waze for local control of your music from within the navigation app.

Winner: Spotify

I’m not going to crown an overall winner here because you may like Tidal or Spotify for reasons very particular to your preferences. The key differences between Tidal vs Spotify are these: Tidal is all about the artist-listener relationship whereas Spotify focuses on the listener as an individual who wants to discover new music and share it with their friends. Additionally, Tidal offers high-fidelity audio whereas Spotify does not, but Tidal HiFi is more expensive than Spotify Premium. All in all, both streaming services are popular for good reason, but you’ll have to decide which is the one for you.

Next: Why I’m an avid Spotify user despite dubious audio quality

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Spotify.com is a popular tool for discovering new music to listen to. It’s free to sign up for and use, and you can take it with you on your tablet computer or smart phone. You can build a collection of songs that you like (and/or own) and organize them into playlists, or let Spotify find new music for you based on genres, artists, or songs that you already like. You can also network with your friends and favourite bands on Spotify, and check in on each other’s latest musical endeavour.

How Can Spotify Be Free

However, Spotify’s functionality is limited unless you sign up for a paid subscription; you’ll have to listen to commercials between songs, and you can’t listen to your music offline. Spotify also no longer allows for the purchase and download of songs that you hear on Spotify, meaning that you can no longer play music from Spotify on a different media player or move it to another device.

If Spotify is just not the hot spot for music for you, there are plenty of sites like Spotify out there that you can try instead. Here are six that get mentioned on the Internet frequently.

1. Pandora

(www.pandora.com)

One of the most popular websites like Spotify, Pandora focuses heavily on discovery of music. It allows you to create custom radio stations based on songs or artists that you like, and it allows 100 as opposed to Spotify’s 20! The downside is that your options for listening to songs on demand are limited, and a free account only lets you skips songs every so often, and causes advertisements to play between songs. Its monthly subscription rate is cheaper than that of Spotify, though, at $5 per month instead of $10. Pandora is currently only available in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, because of concerns over copyright and music licensing.

2. Deezer

(www.deezer.com)

A French-based music streaming service, Deezer is another popular Spotify alternative. Deezer allows you to listen to songs on-demand from a large library, and create custom playlists based on your favourites (you can even rate playlists, too). It also has a “radio stations” function, where you can listen to mixes based on songs or artists, or use the “Flow” or “Hear This” functions to create your own based on music in your collection or that you’ve listened to recently. Deezer is free to use, but you’ll need a paid subscription to play songs without advertisements in between, or play music offline on your mobile device.

3. Google Play Music

(play.google.com/music)

In addition to being an alternative to Spotify, Google Play Music also allows you to store music that you already have (up to 50,000 songs!) on the Internet, so that you can access it from anywhere. This feature is free, but the streaming service — and the ability to create custom radio stations — requires a $10 monthly subscription. On the bright side, you are allowed to purchase and download music onto your computer from Google Play Music, something that you can’t do on Spotify.

4. Tidal

Best Use Of Free Spotify Subscription

(www.tidal.com)

One of the newest Spotify competitors, Tidal is owned by rapper Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and several like-minded artists. One of the major motivations behind it was to create a music-streaming service that resulted in more royalty money being given directly to artists themselves, instead of record labels and other music distribution middlemen. Tidal’s other main draw is that it offers a library of 25 million songs in high-quality audio, as well as over 75,000 high-definition music videos (including some exclusive content). However, Tidal has no free options (besides free trials of its services), and subscriptions are pricey (usually between $10 and $20 per month).

5. iTunes

Best Use Of Free Spotify App

(www.apple.com/itunes)

While it’s not exactly a music streaming service like Spotify, iTunes does let you listen to certain Internet radio stations free of charge. It also allows you to purchase and download the music that you listen to — something that Spotify doesn’t do — and organize it into playlists, move it to other devices, and so on. You can also do this with certain movies and TV show episodes. Again, unlike Spotify, you don’t pay for subscriptions on iTunes; you just pay for each song, album, playlist, movie, or TV show episode/season that you want to watch.

Best Use Of Free Spotify Accounts

6. Apple Music

(www.apple.com/music)

Best Use Of Free Spotify Music Converter

Apple Music is basically Apple’s competitor to Spotify. It features a vast library of songs that you can listen to commercial-free, and sort into playlists or custom radio stations based on your preferences. Apple Music also has pre-made radio stations curated by celebrity DJs and musical artists that you can listen to, as well as the “Connect” feature where you can get an exclusive look at what your favourite singers and bands are up to. Apple Music costs about $10 per month (or $15 for a family-wide subscription), though you can get a three-month free trial of it.

How To Best Use Spotify

Have you used any of these services similar to Spotify? Were they music to your ears, or just a bunch of white noise? Have you gotten in tune with any other potential alternatives to Spotify that we should know about? Let us know in the comments below.

Also, if one of these websites or apps strikes a chord with you, and you want to use it in place of Spotify, our last tutorial will show you how to delete your Spotify account.

Best Use Of Free Spotify Playlists