Six Weeks With Tidal

I’ve now had about six weeks using Tidal Premium, the 312kps streaming service. Given that the CD-quality hi-fi service needs around 5Mb/s streaming, I would not trust, given my recent experience, Talk-Talk not to throttle me back and then take four weeks to pretend they hadn’t done anything of the sort and re-set the service.

I thought I would use Tidal to listen to new music, and indeed, the very first time on, this was the first track I heard, from a playlist:

What I’d forgotten is that most new music, given how much I’ve heard in my life, is either awful crap not to my taste, or is a lot like music I’ve already heard before.

What I’m really doing is listening again to albums that I grew tired of or just left behind at some point: to my old record collections. One big surprise was how much I liked the Paul Simon album, which is now on my Wish List, along with Laura Nyro’s Smile. I had a Frank Sinatra binge one Saturday, and a Duke Ellington binge another weekend. I’m listening to Van Morrison’s Hard Nose The Highway now, and it’s as good as I remember it. I finally listened to the Eagle’s Hotel California album all the way through. Also some War Against Drugs, Snarky Puppy, Famous Blue Raincoat, some ABC, and Steely Dan. I’d forgotten how downright weird Katy Lied is.

This is a walk down memory lane. It will come to an end, and then I’ll have the whole classical and new music thing to address again.

Tidal's classical music coverage is weak, but now I think about it, classical music lovers will pay for the CD, and I can imagine that the Naxos and others of this world might not want to play. Then there's Classical Archives https://www.classicalarchives.com/, at $80 a year.

Now for the serious bit. The lack of the Complete Works of the SOS Band is criminal. I have no idea which record company is screwing around with their catalogue, but they should stop it, and release re-masters of all the albums. The SOS Band were the greatest single contribution that Jam And Lewis made to Western Culture, and that’s saying a lot, given the rest of their catalogue.

I’m not sure I’ve put the effort into getting the best out of the Tidal search engine: from a quick tour round some classical forums, the search engine is rated as rubbish, but they say the music is there if you can find it.

Would I recommend it? Sure. Why not? Is it better than the others? I don’t know. Right now I’m streaming Classical Archives Internet Radio which is making a darn fine job on my Mac Air of a Sonata for Two Pianos by Muzio Clementi - and if you don’t know Clementi’s work, you’re in for a treat. So I may be subscribing there for a while.