Tidal reviews
What users love and hate, from real reviews
An audiophile streaming service with best-in-class Hi-Res/FLAC sound and fair artist payouts — all trapped behind an app that constantly drops playback and gets worse with every update.
What users love
Sound quality is the one reason people put up with Tidal
Almost everyone praises the sound: Hi-Res, FLAC and Dolby Atmos clearly beat Spotify and the rest, and people forgive the app a lot for it.
The sound quality is incredible. so much better than any music streaming service out there.
Outstanding audio quality and the app is very easy to use in both mobile and android auto
the five stars are just for the sound quality. everytime I listen to a song I already know through this app I hear a new element
The ethical choice: fair artist payouts and no ICE ads
Many switched from Spotify on principle — Tidal pays artists 3-4x more and runs no ICE ads — and they'll endure the clunky app for that reason alone.
Pays artists 3-4x per stream what Spotify does. High quality audio and a pretty familiar and intuitive interface.
I moved from Spotify because I don't want to support genocide and I know Tidal pays their artists the most.
great audio quality and actually pays artists
When a redesign finally lands, users notice
It's not all grim: some recent updates get praise — the new now-playing is handier, offline lyrics arrived, you can finally filter playlists when adding a track, and the app feels more stable.
the redesign of the song interface is genuinely so well done, everything is easy to find and it's wonderful!
the new UI is MUCH better and fixes many of the previous problems.
I love the new UI and the sound quality. The Chromecasting problem is resolved. Thanks.
What users hate
Music cuts out mid-song with a "network error", even on solid Wi-Fi
The single most common complaint: every other track the app throws a connection error and freezes, and only a force stop fixes it — even though Wi-Fi and 5G are perfectly fine.
constant error connection issues since newest update. after everytime a song plays, I get "we've encountered a network issue. please check your connection and try again. (1:2:2000) doesnt matter if im on wifi or not. same issue. everytime. after every song
every few songs the app crashes and lags and says "network error" and the only way to get it to work is force stopping the app
it claims a connection issue happened and freezes after nearly every single song. the error code is 1:2:2000
Every UI update strips features and makes the app worse
Redesigns keep coming: the progress bar and quality label are gone, lyrics got shoved to the top, and a floating player covers everything — users unanimously beg for the old look back.
After years of no UI updates, the UI is now updated frequently - by removing features. Not adding new ones, removing existing features.
Impressive update. Now it's esthetically worse, less functional, and way more buggy. A triple whammy!
with every update, the UI gets worse and worse. tidal was fantastic before but it's looking more like Spotify and its AI slop
Artist pages stop showing their albums and tracks
A very common bug: open an artist and the albums, EPs and top tracks simply aren't there — just playlists and a bio. The only fix is leaving and re-entering, sometimes several times.
I now can rarely open any menus on the artists page, like top tracks, albums etc it will just take you to a black screen.
Last update has left the "Artist" list all but unusable. Click in and you don't see albums or songs.
For the love of god fix the issue with the albums not loading under an artist's page or I'm unsubscribing and moving to Apple Music.
Downloaded tracks won't play offline — the core feature is broken
Offline mode doesn't deliver: downloaded songs show up greyed out or "not available", playlists delete themselves and force you to re-download gigabytes, and the moment you lose signal the music is just gone.
Offline listening is a lie. Simple concept, if the song is downloaded, then it doesn't need to connect to the internet to play, full stop.
It keeps deleting and redownloading playlists and eating up all my data. Why should I use this if it can't even get downloads right?
Some tracks just... won't. It doesn't matter how many times you remove and re-add them to a playlist, they won't download
Artists with the same name get lumped into one profile
A long-standing, unfixed bug: different performers who share a name are merged into a single profile, so half the "new release" alerts are wrong and your feed fills with songs from the wrong artist.
no differentiation between artists with the same name... so, many notifications I get for new albums are not the correct artist.. like half
how often two artists with same/similar names get lumped into one artist profile. This requires me to manually sort through
Plus artists with the same name are still all mixed up together. I've emailed you years ago, you told me you would fix the issue but nothing.
Artist profiles are flooded with unlabelled AI "music"
Feeds and real artists' pages are clogged with AI-generated slop anyone can upload under someone else's name; users demand an AI label and a block toggle, or they leave for Qobuz.
lately I was being swarmed by A.i slop recommendations and on my front page with no tag for being a.i slop. Really disappointing that Tidal is allowing this
Becoming increasingly polluted by AI generated songs, which are terrible and sound grainy. Blocking individual songs/artists is regulated... Please add a toggle to turn off or block AI.
you really need to do something about random people publishing their (probably AI) "music" to actual artists' pages. my feed is filled with JUNK.
The app crashes and freezes, sometimes won't even open
Crashes have become "part of the Tidal experience": it dies when adding to a playlist, when opening an album, hangs on the splash screen — and reinstalling or clearing cache doesn't help.
Constant playback errors and app crashes. These are part of the Tidal experience and they won't go away even after years of complaints by seemingly half of the paying user base.
it was good but today started to crash if I click to add to a playlist or to go to the album from the song and other basic functions it makes the app crash
Today it decided to just stop opening at all. Boots up the logo splash screen and stops responding.
Android Auto and Tidal Connect are the weakest link
In the car and on external gear everything falls apart: Tidal Connect drops from streamers, Android Auto never remembers your place in a playlist, Waze and Google Maps integration is gone, and Sonos/HEOS links keep breaking.
tidal is a great service but their android and Android Auto apps are straight trash...constantly erroring out due to "connection issues"
The technical issues with Sonos integration are unbelievably bad. I don't know why this known issue remains.
Tidal connect constantly disconnects from my Naim streamer, skips tracks, stops playing at random.
Search can't find tracks that are clearly in the catalog
Search routinely returns "no match found" even with both title and artist typed in, and you can't search inside your own playlist — you scroll by hand. Everyone agrees Spotify is clearly better here.
the search function is lacking, and metadata needs attention. Even when searching with song title and artist included, I often can't find what I'm looking for. Spotify is genuinely better on this front.
Why does the search function never work when I'm trying to search my playlists for a song? I have had this app for months and this issue persists.
The search tool only works if all the songs load, otherwise it says "no match found" for whatever you write.
Playback doesn't resume where you left off
A basic thing every rival has: if the app sits in the background even an hour, the queue empties and you must start the session over — especially maddening in the car via Android Auto.
every other major music app allows me to continue listening to what I had been playing, an hour ago, a day ago, or even a week ago. if tidal goes dormant in the background I lose whatever I was listening to.
if I don't listen to music for an hour, my queue will completely empty itself, causing me to have to restart my session
Never resumes where I left off on Android Auto - most of my streaming is in the car.
You pay for a subscription but only get 30-second previews
A harsh billing-and-access bug: people pay for premium or renew, yet the app still serves only 15-30 second previews — and support refuses refunds.
paid for subscription but only 30 sec preview available. Useless app. Qobuz works much better
it keeps giving me only previews even when I have premium.
I just renewed my subscription, and have received nothing but errors, even deleted and reinstalled, I contacted tidal and they said I couldn't receive refund.
Shuffle replays the same 30-50 songs on a loop
"Shuffle" really just loops a narrow handful of recently added tracks and ignores the rest of a library of hundreds; in Android Auto it only cycles the oldest ~100 songs.
When I select shuffle for my playlist, I expect to hear every single song before I hear a repeat or at least have the option to select that kind of shuffle. I currently get a rotation of roughly 40-50 songs over and over again.
shuffle only gives me the same 5 songs even though I have 800+ songs on my list
Shuffle a playlist seems to be broken in Android Auto too. It only shuffles my oldest added ~100 songs out of 500.