Here at Production Expert we’ve always been fans of TIDAL. Read Russ’ article “Why I Ditched Apple Music and Spotify for TIDAL - The Music Producer's Friend” to find out some of the reasons why. The convenience of streaming and the quality of lossless audio are a compelling offer to us. TIDAL has its detractors. Often the criticisms are based on a perception that not as much music is available on TIDAL, While in the early days this may have had some truth to it in my experience the biggest omissions I’ve come across were user error - I was mis-spelling the name of the artist I was looking for!

Another criticism is that there “no-one is on TIDAL”, obviously some people are but compared to Spotify or Apple music user numbers are certainly lower and the convenience and usefulness of the ability to share playlists is closely linked to how many of the people you wish to share playlists with use the same platform as you do.

However there are some areas beyond streaming quality in which TIDAL have always led the field and one of these is their sincere attempts to do more to support the artists and production staff who make the music they stream. In a recent move TIDAL have introduced Interactive Credits,

Roles are divided into the following categories:

• Songwriter: This includes credits those with roles for crafting a song such as composer, lyricist, author.

• Production: Includes producer, coproducer, mastering engineer, mixing engineer, recording engineer, arranger, and programmer — roles that supports the production of a track.

• Musician: Features those who contributed on some level to a song’s instrumentals and vocals.

• Misc: This includes other roles not directly contributing to a track’s creation, such as art direction, art work, A&R, etc.

There is also a facility to report an error. We like this development. Lots of people say they miss the sleeve notes printed on physical product but in spite of their visibility on the product, credits on a record sleeve could never link out to other projects in this way.

Of course streaming doesn’t pay like CD sales did but that’s a whole different subject!