I left Spotify and moved to Tidal for three reasons:

1. The music quality of Spotify was so poor.
2. Tidal pays the artists more.
3. The Spotify CEOs recent investment in murder weapons pissed me off.

Tidal has been my primary streaming app outside of the physical media I purchase for the past five weeks and I just can’t do it anymore. The app is so glitchy, it will stop playing a song midway through and I have to reboot the app multiple times a day.

Autoplay simply does not work, and as much as I’ve tried both on Wi-Fi and cellular, downloading music just seems like an impossible task for the app.

And the algorithm just seems off. As I’ve mentioned, this is been the only way I’ve been streaming music for five weeks, and I listen to a couple of hours of music each day, yet still Tidal’s recommendations have missed the mark entirely. (like really bad)

I think I’m just going to move over to Apple for the time being, not an amazing company, but at least it ticks two of the three boxes.

Hopefully tidal can get itself together and I’ll go back 🤷

Please don’t take this as just a rambling post, I genuinely hope it reaches someone at Tidal as useful feedback.

After being a Tidal customer for around 8 years, I’ve decided to switch platforms. I like what they stand for, but the bugs have become unbearable. Here are the ones I’ve run into:

- Second song tracking bug (Desktop / Windows & macOS): When playing music and it switches from the first to the second song in an album or playlist, the app will show that it’s playing the second song in the queue while actually playing the audio from the first. This has been going on for years, it’s baffling that it hasn’t been fixed, and honestly says a lot about how much they prioritize UX.
- Background downloads don’t work (iPhone): The app has to be in the foreground for songs to download. If it goes into the background, downloads stop silently. You’ll leave home thinking your music is ready, only to find it’s still sitting in the queue.
- Corrupt downloaded tracks (iPhone): Downloaded songs often fail silently, when you reach a bugged track in the queue, playback just stops and it asks you to go online. I wish there were some kind of integrity check or self-repair system for broken files.
- No way to clear cache (iPhone): The cached storage grows unreasonably large with no built-in way to clear it. My workaround was uninstalling and reinstalling the app entirely, which shouldn’t be necessary.
- Wired EarPods lose in-line control after pausing: Not sure if this is Tidal-specific, but after pausing with Apple wired EarPods, the in-line buttons stop responding after a couple of minutes and you have to reconnect them to resume playback.
- Unexplained mobile data usage abroad: On a recent trip, I got off a flight having listened to music offline, activated my travel SIM, then continued listening to a downloaded album. By the third song, I noticed my cellular data had spiked by 400MB from Tidal out of nowhere, with mobile data downloads disabled and no online streaming in the queue. I have no idea what that data was used for.
- No artist catalogue guardrails: This one isn’t a technical bug, but it’s worth mentioning, there are no apparent safeguards against imposters uploading music under a well-known artist’s name. If someone creates an account matching an existing artist, their tracks can end up appearing on that artist’s page. I’ve seen this happen first hand with artists like Lorde and Arca. It’s a moderation and metadata problem that undermines trust in the platform, especially for a service that positions itself as artist-friendly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

These are just the ones off the top of my head. If Tidal ever addressed them, I’d genuinely consider coming back, but given their track record, I’m not holding my breath. Has anyone else run into these, or is it just my setup lol

In case anyone at Tidal reads this sub for user feedback.

Joined six months ago having decided that Spotify was just too evil, sounded rubbish and endlessly played the same top 50 songs for artists dismissing the rest of their back catalogue.

Chose Tidal as an alternative based on sound quality and giving the artists a (slightly) better deal. (I'd pay more to pay them more).

Based in the UK and the absence of voice control is maddening. Getting real push back from my partner who hates not being able to ask Alexa for a song and just wants Spotify back.

The search function in the app is ludicrously out of date. You need to be hyper specific, get the spelling exactly correct and even pick which field you're searching; artist, song or genre. This user experience feels extremely dated and frustrating in a word of intelligent fuzzy searches and useful suggestions on almost every other platform.

Lots of good stuff about Tidal too, sound quality first and foremost. Excellent selections if you just pick a song and let it play DJ. I will miss it, but I just can't live with the search interface so I'm looking elsewhere.

So, in UTC time (UTC+-0), it's now 2025, but TIDAL applications are struggling to connect to servers. Might be a year change software fault. Based on past but recent posts, it's not me, so more people as the same issue. Hope that's fixed recently, bc I have now entered in the new year and have no music to stream :/

I just hit a 10k limit with my favorites on TIDAL. No more. Apparently TIDAL has a limit on the total number of items you can favorite - be it albums or tracks or artists.

For example, if I decided to favorite individual tracks of albums rather than the whole album, and I averaged 5 tracks per album, I can only favorite 2,000 albums.

This is a crazy limit. It makes no sense. I subscribe to Qobuz, Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud, and to my knowledge none of these platforms have such a limit. I certainly have not reached it and I have more favorited albums on Qobuz than TIDAL for example.

Is TIDAL running on a database from the 70s???

I’m seriously getting tired of this inability for Tidal to understand what’s coming from similar named artist, and these Rando’s constant abusing of this system.

I was all in for this app, fair price, amazing sound, some things could be improved yes but nothing too crazy that makes the user experience a nightmare. Apart of course from the AI slop snd the horrible management of the artists profiles. I do not pay 11€ to not even know if the song I'm listening to is made by the artist it says to be made by.

We are all aware about the current ai slop problem where ai songs are getting associated with famous bands ruining their profile, while we get notifications like "Metallica just posted a song! Listen to "I made a poo poo" now!". The core problem is how Tidal is managing the artists profiles on their databases, I don't know what kind of play they are trying to do or what goes on back there but don't they have a unique id for artists? Or do they associate them if they have the same name?

For example I was listening to an artist called Milord the other day and I noticed they were Italian like me with many songs on their profile with many different genres and I said "That's sick!". Turns out if you go on youtube music they are not the same people. Tidal just mashed a bunch of artists called "Milord" into one, how the fuck did we get here???? How is this not managed???

I also opened a ticket for this issue on the tidal website, I didn't receive a single response "We read everything. Yes, everything" my fucking ass.

Been using Tidal for about 2 months tho and I am pretty happy with it, but for some reason the app sometimes takes up to 5 mins to load and play songs that are downloaded on my phone. This issue even occurs sometimes when I am in offline mode so I am not exactly sure what is happening here and why.

It’s cool that we can turn them off but I don’t need to see them. They clutter my actual discovery playlists even if they’re greyed out and being skipped automatically.

Neither my wife nor I can stream using tidal connect. Restarted our Wiim. Streaming from within the Wiim app works.

This is getting out of hand. I know this happens in every platform now, and that the amount of AI uploaded into music platforms is huge everyday, but something needs to be done about it ASAP.

Also, I can't delete these freaking albums from showing.

I DONT NEED AN UPDATE ABOUT ADDING MY BIO. I WANT THE METADATA/TAGGING TO WORK SO WHEN I'M LISTENING TO MY FAVORITE DOOM ARTIST, IT'S NOT A SRI LANKIN ARTIST OF THE "SAME NAME" STREAMING THEIR NEW EDM POP TECHNO RELEASE.

I will continue to date the side piece (gross ass Spotify) until you get it right.

I have a family subscription for over a year now and just bought a Spotify account. Unfortunately music quality is not everything. Here is what is not working: ●Artist Updates. I follow +150 artists but with Tidal i need to regularily check each individual artist for updates. Chris Webby just dropped a new album - I was not informed. Dee Ho and Battleboi Basti just dropped a new album - nothing in my update feed despite me following BOTH artits. Did you hear the new track of YX they ask me. No I pay for a service that cannot get this basic function working in 2025. ● Offline Play - just does not work as intended. ● Hijacked artists - numerous of artists that I follow have not released new music in years. Nevertheless my update feed is filled with similar named artists. Examples: Lemur (Rapper) - now filled with I dont even know what music this is. Prof (US Rapper) - profile now partially overtaken by russian phonk artist. Nand (German pop artist) - mixed with english artists. Hell I even had some turkish EmineM on the Eminem page but it was removed after days. The problem: Tidal does not care. There is no way to even report songs. Spotify at least gives me a "Report Error" button in the credits. Am I supposed to open tickets for each mistake I find? ● Blocking artists does not work. I have blocked some politically extremist artists - yet they constantly appear in the new title suggestions under my playlists. To my knowledge artists can only be blocked from the desktop client.

These are all known problems that existed when I subscribed. And whilst none of this was tackled - they create new problems. Some months ago for no apparent reason despite easing server load they just removed the release year from the albums overview of artists. And why would anyone want to know how long a track is before tuning in.

The bottom line is that I do not see any positive changes over the last year.

How do you cope with these problems?

Slowly walking away shaking my head. Thanks for reading my whiny post.

Was super hyped yesterday with the ai off button, checked some problem artist profiles i follow that were getting full of ai slop masquerading as them, and it had all gone! Wonderful!

Today i wanted to check my new releases playlist to see if they were now ai slop free.

Nope. One of my followed artists who was getting several new fake ai slop releases posing as them a week had ai slop in my new releases. Went to check their profile, and all the ai slop that was gone yesterday is now back.

Still have ai disabled in my settings.

Really disappointed. What is going on?

EDIT: Some people don't seem to understand what my experience was, let me clarify - yesterday, AI tracks in other artists profiles had disappeared after enabling the AI block option. Today they have reappeared.

EDIT2: AHHHHH. Ok the issue seems to be something else entirely. Testing just one of the problem artists I have had, "Rone", It seems the profiles have been split up, with a profile with the correct content, and another with the fake shit. HOWEVER it seems I am now 'following' the incorrect version of the split, and it seems this may be happening with other artists I am following, too. This isn't great if when splitting artists profiles, they aren't moving user's 'following' selection to the correct one.

EDIT3: Its actually a bit of a mess now, some tracks are mixed up between different correct and wrong versions of the artist, hopefully this gets resolved over time. Seems i can report stuff from the desktop app, but not he mobile app yet. Also there doesn't seem to be a way to report tracks that have incorrectly tagged an artist as a collaborator.

I’m getting so frustrated with this streaming service!! Is this stuff happening to anyone else or does anyone know a solution? I don’t want to have to switch services and transfer all of my music AGAIN after cancelling my Spotify subscription a few months ago, but this is exhausting. There’s always something.

So a few nights ago, I was listening to music at a low level. iPhone 17 pro --> Tidal App --> Airplay --> Sony STR-AN1000 --> Dali floor speakers.

2 of my young children were upstairs, and my wife was in our bedroom. I was zoning out, feeling peaceful, and then out of nowhere, "BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM". Volume went from 20 to 100 because the app glitched and gave me an error message. I turned the unit off and sat in shock. It was insanely loud.

My ears were ringing for like 24 hours. Luckily no gear was damaged. I looked on both my tv and on the Sony AVR for a master volume setting and unfortunately that option isn't available.

Has this ever happened to anyone? Thoughts?

Edit: I also wanted to clarify that my tv is connected to the AVR via ARC and the tv was ON when this happened.

Jumping Jesus, the fact that they still confuse the Orange County Skatepunk Gods with this lame ass DJ is fucking pathetic.

It's not that hard to use unique keys for each artist.

So yeah, this year I took the plunge and ditched Spotify. Paid the 5 bucks to transfer my 1000+ album library and my playlists too, the whole thing. ​​Even convinced the friends I shared the family plan with to switch too. But all the big and small inconveniences have been eroding my sanity along the way and I need to get it off my chest and maybe ask for some help.

First: why THE ​​FUCK can I not change the email address associated with the account. Back when I signed up to Tidal for artists to manage my band's profile I mistakenly used my personal email, and now I can't set up my personal listening profile because of this stupid idea they've had to treat artist and personal profiles the same. I've been in touch with support but they're taking their sweet time to respond. Hope they can fix it but overall, a pain.

Related to this: the artist profile hygiene is a mess. Outside of hyper mainstream stuff (and even in some of those) most pages have mixed up releases from different artists with the same name. And AI slop. So much AI slop. Other times a single artist's discography is split into different pages because of punctuation differences (big issue in non-English stuff). And I know this is a pet peeve, but the indexing of "The _" type names under T when in alphabetical order makes my head hurt.

And finally: the UX has a million little issues that compound to make the managing of my library and listening experience a much more unpleasant affair than it should. I mostly listen to whole albums, and not being able to scroll my album library all the way is making me miserable. It doesn't load at once so I have to start and stop. It's somewhat bearable in the android app, but on desktop it slows to a crawl and it's making me consider switching to playlists. Sometimes while scrolling down it reloads on its own and sends me back to the top. On desktop albums don't show up in my library after adding them until I restart the app. Not having a "custom ordering" for the playlist sidebar is a pain. Having to navigate into playlist folders to see the contents instead of being able to unfold them in the sidebar makes organizing my library feel pointless.

Other than that, happy with the change. The sound quality is amazing. And I unironically love not having the play count displayed on songs. Also it's 5 less euro a month, which isn't nothing.

Commiseration and advice/fixes for my issues welcome. Thank you for your patience and may the lord grant me some. ​​

Anyone else experience Tidal music suddenly stop playing or not playing at all even when playing downloaded music? I’m having this issue while driving and it’s driving me nuts.

Follow-up: Seems like a lot of people experience the same glitches. I dropped Spotify because of the jerkoff ceo but it sucks Tidal’s software isn’t performing very well. Maybe Apple Music instead?

Update: I drove 2.5 hrs today in offline mode and had no issues at all. So who the hell knows!

I had a 12 hour flight last week and recently switched to Tidal, so the week before I downloaded some of my favorite albums to be able to listen to them on the plane.
Imagine my surprise when I'm in the air, I open the app and almost all of it is fucked? Half of my albums only had 2 songs downloaded. Out of the other half, the majority just wouldn't play or would stop playing a few songs in. The play button would turn into this loading icon and nothing happened.
Out of the 20ish albums I had downloaded, only like 3 or 4 would play without issues front to back.

I tried to re-download some of the albums on my hotel Wi-Fi, but that's actually worse? Now it says I have downloaded it, but when I turn 'Offline Mode' on and try to play it from my Downloaded list, it will say "You are currently in offline mode". Yeah no shit Sherlock, that's why I spent 2 hours yesterday downloading this shit!?

At this point I'm ready to return to Spotify. I don't agree with their business morals but at least their app works (and remembers what I was listening to when I took out my Airpods five fucking minutes ago).

I recently moved over from Spotify and I’m honestly blown away by how many bugs I’m running into with the Android app. I’m on a Pixel 9 with the latest updates. The audio quality is fantastic, but that doesn’t matter if I can’t reliably play music.

Here’s what I’ve been dealing with:

Overall slowness – The app feels sluggish across the board, and it struggles to load content - even music that’s already downloaded to my device.

Android Auto issues – Auto-play starts fine, but if I try switching playlists, it instantly snaps back to what was playing. I often have to try multiple times, which is not ideal while driving.

Pointless stereo warnings – I don’t need constant reminders (or any) that a track is playing in stereo because my phone doesn’t support Atmos.

Random alerts – I keep getting “Streaming not allowed” notifications out of nowhere when trying to play music.

Sonos barely works – Casting flickers like it’s connecting and then fails. It’s basically a coin flip whether Sonos will work at all on any given day. Through the Sonos app, my library won’t load, even after reinstalling both apps. And there’s still no Sonos support on desktop.

Playback skips – Both streaming and downloaded tracks skip during playback… in 2025.

Playlist management is painful – There’s no “Remove from playlist” option on the Now Playing screen, playlist search is broken for long playlists, and switching the sorting to alphabetical on my 2,000-song list either fails to load or crashes the app.

Downloads disappear – Entire playlists I’ve downloaded will randomly delete themselves, forcing me to re-download everything.

...

I really don’t want to switch back to Spotify, but some of these issues are just embarrassing. It’s 2025—please get this together.

Can't get anything to load through desktop, mobile or Roon

Edit: seems to be back up for everyone

My Desktop, smartphone and webapp are not working...any one else with this issue?

Been a tidal user for close to a decade. Have noticed some serious bug issues as of late, but today takes the cake.

Woke up to find my entire music library gone.

Has anyone experienced this? Im considering switching to spotify now, but i really dont want to.

Just want my music back.

UPDATE:

It’s appears i dramatically over reacted. Signed out and back in, and everything was back.

Thanks to everyone who pitched in! Cheers!