Spotify Users Encouraged to Move Playlists Over to Tidal

Swimming Against the Tide

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Almost throughout the on-going release/hype period for Tidal, Jay Z’s music streaming platform, he and his famous friends have asserted that it is definitely not a Spotify rival. It was difficult enough to back up that claim before, given how remarkably similar in structure the two platforms are, but now it’s going to be even harder, given that Tidal have partnered with Soundiiz, a service designed to help you smoothly transfer playlists between programs. In particular it’s geared towards shifting Spotify playlists around. Permission to make a suspicious humming sound. Granted? Good. HMMMMMMMMM.

It’s not purely Spotify-centric, it works for Soundcloud, Rdio, iTunes and a few others too, but with the Tidal partnership the emphasis is very much on the former. According to early reports it works reasonably well, insofar that the playlists transfer across, but not necessarily entirely intact, some tracks might get lost or at least a bit maimed along the way. Track titles and other text information comes out a bit garbled on the other side from time to time. It is still very much in the beta phase, so exceptions can be made, we’ll just have to wait and see how much the service improves as time goes by.

To me, this seems like an earlier gambit to accelerate signup rates, since perhaps the crowd response wasn’t as hot as Jay Z, Kanye and pals were expecting. Higher sound quality on a streaming service might be a big draw for audiophiles, but they make up such a small contingent of the consumer-base that it’s difficult to understand why any mainstream service would attempt to appeal to them first and foremost. We can’t all afford Sennheiser Orpheus HD 800s.

Iceberg Slim (yes, that’s actually one of Jay Z’s numerous nicknames) isn’t even the first hip-hop giant to try this out. Over on the west coast, Dr Dre introduced Beats, an extension of his Beats by Dre hardware line last year. It’s since been bought by Apple for a few dumptrucks’ worth of money. It’s worth keeping in mind that Tidal has only been with us for a matter of weeks and it’s still figuring out exactly what it is in many ways. With time and refinement it might well carve out its own little niche in the music streaming world, but it won’t bring down Spotify and it shouldn’t try.

Callum Davies

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

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