I’ve never found the best reason to subscribe to a streaming service and pay for their services because of how much it is per month, and it’s not entirely worth it in my opinion, at least if it isn’t of quite a high quality. Tidal as a service provides a CD quality streaming service that costs twice that of Spotify per month, which is the streaming service I’m sure most if not all of you have heard of. In the short experience I’ve had with Tidal for one of my dad’s review, I’ve realized that streaming services do actually have their benefits, which are something that I can get behind, if I had the means to.
Now that I’m a college student, I’ve realized one of the perks of being a student, despite the stress of classes and worrying about GPA, debt, paying for tuition, books and other things is that college students receive benefits for just being a student, such as student discounts, free items, food, etc. etc. At my College’s orientation week itself, I got 3 t-shirts, food, snack, bags, bracelets, towel (small one for working out), a college planner, and at least 2 lanyards for free. One other thing I realized at least a week of two after orientation is that students get things like free software, and discounts on a lot of things too.
That brings me back to Spotify and Tidal. As I researched their services, I realized something as well. They have student discounts for their services. And it’s not like it’s a small discount as well. For example from Spotify, their services is like $9.99 per month. For Students, it’s $4.99. If you round both their prices to say $10 and $5 for simplicity, it’s basically a 50% discount. The same is with Tidal as well. But Tidal offers their CD quality streaming services for a different price. It’s going to set anyone back $19.99 for their HiFI plan that offers CD quality, but it’s be the same as Spotify at $9.99 for their “standard services”. Now they offer students discounts, but the surprising part is that their HiFi service is also offered at a discount as well, from $19.99 to $9.99 which is to say, about a 50% as well. Quite substantial. That actually makes me a bit enticed to subscribe to their services.
However, I still think $9.99 is quite a lot for me, and $4.99 is something more affordable for me, but something came up that’s made me decide that I’ll be trying Spotify for sure instead. Until June 30th 2018, for anyone out there who’s reading this and hasn’t ever subscribed to Spotify EVER, they are offering a $0.99 special for 3 months of subscription, which you can cancel after anytime before the 3 months is up. And that’s what I did. I subscribed. And so far, I haven’t regretted that decision.
So, for anyone out there who hasn’t at all subscribed to Spotify, and wants to try it out over the summer, it’s something I recommend. They have more artists you can play music from compared to Tidal at the moment, but that’s from my perspective because they have a lot more Kpop artists you can play from. Plus, it’s for a 99 cents for a long time of 3 months, of which you may be going to travel, and of which you can save songs offline with that subscription to the service, which is something I like as well, that Tidal has as well. But the deal breaker here is the also obviously the 99 cents for 3 months. There might have been a 3 month trial before, but that was before I had a card as well, which is something that I didn’t have before because you needed a payment method for their trials as well. That made me not want to try it. Now that I have one, it’s a bit more freedom and a bit more decision making for me. But enough of that, this is just me going on a rant and trying to help anyone out there. For those of you reading this, have you tried any streaming services? How have they helped you listen to music a lot more/did it not really affect how much you listen to music? Let me know in the comment below!
HIFI Sound Enthusiast 