Spotify is available on the most recent Sony and Microsoft games consoles, for example, and can be accessed on quite a few smartwatches and other connected wearables too. Obviously both services have been working on making themselves available on as wide a variety of platforms as possible. Spotify has been promising a ‘HiFi’ tier of its own for quite a while now - but details (of the launch date, of the number of titles that will be available, and of exactly what ‘HiFi’ means in this context) remain sketchy in the extreme. ‘Tidal Masters’ use MQA technology to stream at a giddy 9216kbps. A top-of-the-shop ‘HiFi Plus’ subscription, meanwhile, buys access to some music mastered in Sony 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos spatial audio, plus access to millions of truly high-resolution audio titles. Tidal, by way of contrast, streams at a CD-quality 1411kbps on its ‘HiFi’ tier. If you’re paying for Spotify, rather than using the free tier, everything comes across at 320kbps. Spotify’s streams run at three compression rates: a frankly miserly 96kbps, 160kbps and 320kbps.

Here’s where the most significant differences between Spotify and Tidal can be found.

Unless you’ve particularly catholic tastes (I am still waiting for Ginger Thompson’s glorious Boy Watcher to show up on either service), you’ll be able to find the content you’re after on either Spotify or Tidal. When you’re talking about numbers of this size, it’s obvious there’s a massive amount of overlap between the two libraries - the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell notwithstanding.

Spotify vs apple music bitrate