Move aside Spotify – Tidal's latest subscription deal means it could nab the streaming platform's top spot as the world's best value music service – for a limited time, anyway.
Until January 15, Tidal is giving away a five month trial of its service to new customers for just $5 / £5 – and that applies to any of its subscriptions plans.
Normally, Tidal Premium will set you back $9.99 / £9.99 per month, while its lossless high fidelity plan, Tidal HiFi costs $19.99 / £19.99 – so, if you go for the most expensive tier in your trial (and why wouldn't you, if you're a music fan?), you're saving a massive $95 / £95!
The best Tidal deal we've seen
(opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)Tidal is a superb music streaming service, ideal for anyone with a penchant for hi-fidelity audio – that's why we awarded it 4.5 out of 5 stars in our Tidal review.
The biggest benefit of using Tidal over Spotify is its support for Hi-Res Audio codecs, streaming your music in the form of 16bit, 44.1kHz FLAC files with a bitrate of 1411kbps – or in other words, CD-like quality.
Why is that good? Well, services like Spotify offer MP3 files instead; when you compress a music track into an MP3, you have to shave off a lot of detail in order to achieve that miniature file size.
That means you can lose a lot of the finer detail in the audio track, so for true audiophiles, platforms like Tidal, as well as Deezer, Quobuz, and most recently Amazon Music HD, offer the convenience of streaming without the loss of quality.
Usually these services come at a premium, which is why this deal is such good value for money, undercutting even the cheapest Spotify subscription – although you can, of course, use Spotify for free if you don't mind ads and not being able to skip tracks.
- Here are the best headphones to go with your Tidal subscription
