https://tidal.com/upload/d07ab1db-acae-44d7-b784-0445c6fe4841
Video
Brancaster Staithe wildlife walk Norfolk Coast by Adam Swaine
Via Flickr:
At low tide, Brancaster Staithe Harbour becomes a vast expanse of mudflats and shallow tidal creeks, leaving fishing boats resting on the seabed. It is a tranquil, shallow area perfect for birdwatching and exploring coastal paths
Wander through Brancaster Staithe and enjoy the sights of the coast and its wildlife oystercatchers and other birds
Text
out of the yearning music game for a while (had a healthy, 2.5 yr relationship) but im back on my bullshit. im now a tidal user. does anyone have any playlists?
Text
No te pierdas “Las Piedras Más Brillantes”
Escucha Las Piedras Más Brillantes en tu servicio de streaming https://tidal.com/track/70169393/u
Carolina Nissen - Las Piedras Más Brillantes
Video
Curlew and Oystercatcher at Thornham Estuary, Norfolk, UK. by Adam Swaine
Via Flickr:
I’ve been a regular visitor to the North Norfolk Coast for the last 15years, so if I had to pick a favourite wetland it would definitely be up there. The whole stretch of coastline from Snettisham to Sheringham, is a magical mosaic of dunescape, beachscape, reed-beds and mudflats, but it is the great expanses of salt marsh that give the landscape its real sense of wildness and brooding power. The area is a true haven for wildlife, with significant colonies of nesting seabirds and shorebirds in the summer, and huge flocks of geese, ducks and waders in the winter. It is not just the sight but also the remarkable sound of these wide open places that gives them their unique and very particular appeal.
Video
North Norfolk Coast @ Brancaster Staithe by Adam Swaine
Via Flickr:
Beautiful captures the North Norfolk coast at it’s best lovely tidal estuary with Oystercatchers and boats in a 45mph wind! still amazing light yesterday..
Text
Text
No te pierdas “Your Eyes Don’t Lie”
Escucha Your Eyes Don’t Lie en tu servicio de streaming https://tidal.com/track/2017266/u
David Archuleta - Your Eyes Don’t Lie
No sé si your eyes don’t lie >>>> Beast (?
Text
De lo mejor que tiene TIDAL es que las primeras recomendaciones que te aparecen en la página de inicio son playlists armadas por otros usuarios. Y creo que el único parámetro que toman en cuenta es qué tanto coinciden con la música de tu biblioteca. Así que cada vez que abrís TIDAL hay una chance de recibir un flashbang de títulos como CANCIONES PARA EL LECHAZO
Text
No te pierdas “Ay Amor”
Escucha Ay Amor en tu servicio de streaming https://tidal.com/track/30185632/u
🫰🏻
Answer
Yeah I switched from spotify to tidal a few years ago. Two main reasons I switched - sound quality (at least at that time) was so much better on tidal & tidal pays artists slightly more.
Usually what I tell people interested is - Tidal is really nice if you don’t listen to podcasts or like super niche artists. It doesn’t have podcasts and not all small artists are on it. (Tho I listen to literally over a thousand artists a year and maybe have found 1-2 that aren’t on it so I mean like very niche.)
The other thing with tidal is that the search and music recommendations features are imo not as good as Spotify and occasionally there’s some weird stuff with small artists (like for some reason tidal will have two different artist pages for them). But overall, I’ve really enjoyed it. The only thing I even remotely miss is being able to easily share playlists with people who use Spotify lol.
As a business too, since I joined they decreased the overall cost of the family plan and they just gave it to me like I didn’t have to do anything they just decreased the monthly payment for everyone. Low bar, but that impressed me.
Text
TIDAL: The Infuriating Enshittification of a Solid Player
Captain’s Log, Stardate -357614.16
Yesterday, I jumped the 2nd sinking ship this year.
Just like with the first sinking ship, I only left it after it already caught fire.
Yesterday, I quit TIDAL. And it feels good.
TIDAL is a music streaming service that I chose to be the “worthy” and most importantly more ethical replacement to the cancelled spotify subscription.
It’s a service that I deemed to be a based player in the music streaming game. Until I’ve become once more disillusioned by the almost invisible enshittification problem that is now so very widespread throughout pretty much every aspect of mid-2020 life.
This time, also in the “better choice” for music consumption. sigh
In the past couple months, I’ve witnessed TIDAL’s enshittification and some basic research revealed that I am far from the only one who’s seen the downfall. And it’s a rather big one, too!
But what made them good in the first place and what is no longer these days?
We have to go back to the end of 2024, when I made the long overdue decision to FINALLY quit spotify.
In November or December 2025, I got on Apple Music, using a little promo code. I stayed for three or even four months with this.
It was very convenient but I knew that this won’t be a permanent thing for me. For the time being, ANYTHING was better than continuing to use spotify and the timespan would allow me some research. In that time, I also started mocking up my essay on streaming services, which I will post some time after I’ve finished the music review series of 2025.
This post here actually postpones the whole thing a little, but I deemed it an important matter to share with fellow music fans and artists alike.
After my time on Apple Music was over, I went on a quest to find the best solution in the music streaming sphere.
I intended to use both the free trials and the paid plans to test the services, its apps and everything else that was related.
While you can read some more details in the upcoming essay, I will say here that I didn’t test all the available services for various reasons. My two criteria were ethics and usability.
It’s important to state at this point that there is no such thing as an entirely ethical streaming service. But there are better and worse options to choose from and to support.
The first service that I’ve tried after Apple Music was TIDAL.
Just overall, the app experience the artist pay-outs that I’ve heard about from actual musicians in my circles were convincing enough. And then there’s the sound quality, a no-brainer!
After the trial month and an additional month or two of a paid subscription, I went on to the next thing. I firmly believe that a most objective opinion can only be formed after all options were taken into consideration.
It clearly and unsurprisingly stood out to me that ROKK is the most ethical by far. Hell yeah! 🤘🏻
Sadly, it being primarily focused on the rock/metal spectrum, it’s not the best solution for all the listeners out there. Actually, it’s not even perfect for myself although I mostly listen to music on this very spectrum!
It’s a service that I wanted to linger on a little longer but at the time, I found it too limiting for my versatile taste.
There’s almost any genre on there, but the database felt extremely incomplete, even within the rock and metal spectrum.
Sadly, at the time I found it impossible to find most of the out-of-genre music that I enjoyed and even some favourite (live) albums of rock or metal bands that I follow. So, I moved on.
Trust me, I love my versatility but it can be quite the curse sometimes! It was in this very case.
Still, for the mission alone I intended to come back to ROKK at some point and see how they’ve done.
Maybe someone with a less eclectic taste would find their new home in this new service, so I kept recommending the still unknown service whenever someone mentioned ditching spotify.
I still remember the Indiegogo campaign for their noble cause and I loosely followed it.
At the time, I was still a spotify user but heard many negative stories of artists and how they were treated. The list of reasons to hate this company was growing by the day towards the end of 2024. I am deeply ashamed that I only made the decision so late, but at least, I left BEFORE the massive bomb dropped (literally and figuratively). I don’t consider this a flex, it’s more of an inner relief of mine.
At the time of initially testing ROKK, and also at the time of writing this post, the only truly ethical thing is to pay your musicians directly for their music.
The next best thing is buying the music through their official channels (best case scenario: on Bandcamp) and long after all the other ways to legally purchase the music, there’s the most ethical streaming service to date: ROKK.
I regretted the limitations and chose to continue my streaming-hopping with another favourite among spotify-ditchers. As I learned in the past months, it is perhaps the next best thing after ROKK. It’s the French streaming service Deezer.
Sadly, when I tried Deezer, there’s been a few issues.
Those unfortunately didn’t get resolved by switching from free trial to paid subscription.
For some time, I was juggling TIDAL and Deezer against each other, only to stick to TIDAL.
TIDAL ticked many boxes for me. They offered HiRes audio quality without costing much more than spotify (if my memory serves me right).
Point is, they offered a much better listening experience by default (where technically possible!). I was naturally gravitating to this app with all the perks that I already mentioned before. The only downside for me personally was the TV app experience, but it wasn’t too horrible, either.
In fact, regarding audio quality and pay-out, I should’ve gone with Qobuz, you could say at this point. Good one, I actually wanted to!
At the time of my test phase, Qobuz also had the 2nd highest pay-out of the major streaming services! The highest was a service that I chose not to test for other resasons.
However, I noticed a major flaw that discouraged me from investing any money into Qobuz and even temporarily made me listen to music less.
All details can be found in my upcoming essay, but what’s essential for you to know right now is that there were massive metadata issues for the individual songs and albums.
So, when looking up the UK prog band ARENA, for example, I saw other “Arenas” in the list. Nothing out of the ordinary, that was the main overview. But when clicking on the correct artist profile, I saw songs by the other “Arenas” in there with those songs. WTF?
My first thought was: How can I know who gets the money?
Will the correct ARENA-named band get money from my stream or will it go to that DJ that goes under the same name?
I’ll come back to that problem in a bit, but this was my major deterrent.
A big part of the deal with leaving spotify was consuming music more ethically and do more for the artists I choose to listen to.
I am a CD-buyer, I still rip my CDs to my HiRes DAP.
But sometimes on the go, especially at the office and when researching something, streaming is my go to way of listening and discovering music.
I can only buy that many physical albums in a year and I prefer to allocate my CD budget towards the bands that mean something to me and the new WOW-kind of discoveries that I made thanks to streaming.
After the trial period was over, I didn’t renew Qobuz with a paid subscription like I did with all the other services in the test. I directly opted for TIDAL instead and stayed until yesterday.
I was a happy TIDAL user, found almost all my music on it with the very rare exception here and there, actually more than on Qobuz.
I enjoyed the audio quality and at some point even had a family plan to share.
And then, not too long ago, I noticed a major red flag: metadata tagging went rogue.
The same issue that made me chose TIDAL over Qobuz was now happening to my platform of choice.
One day, I put on one of the for-you playlists (not a good thing, as you’ll learn from my essay), but the constellation of band/artist names in it was nice.
A quick glance over the playlist got me worried; there’s been songs by artists that I know, but the songs didn’t seem familiar at all.
New songs? Impossible.
Different artist operating under the same name? Could be… those weren’t my artists at all!
One of the artists in question was a man with a very distinct voice and accent, who died in 1998: Falco.
Not my typical sound, but an artist I really enjoy listening to.
Both the tone in his voice and the accent are so specific, I’d recognise him everywhere.
Unless it was a lost song now published, which music media would be fast to report about, it had to be a fake. A remaster or remix would normally be named appropriately. So it’s not that , either.
Looking at the TIDAL artist page, the “new song” appeared under EP & Singles.
The album art was off, but what do I know. Yet there were many weird, unrelated songs under the artist name.
Judging from some of the titles and covers, there must be more artists with this name out there in different countries, so indeed an attribution issue. But there’s also been some evident AI album art and titles that make no sense with Falco.
I deliberately didn’t give the songs with an AI-cover a chance, so I don’t know if they imitate his voice or not, but I expect anything from them, really.
The song in the playlist that brought this problem to my attention seemed, from what I was able to hear, human-made. I hope. But it was not even remotely close to his voice, style, language, anything. Not even a voice insert of his was in the song.
Today I actually worry that I involuntarily listened to an AI song here, after all.
This reminded me of this horrifying thing I read about spotify months after leaving. To not artificially prolong the article, I link this article for you.
So, did this problem flood over to TIDAL as well now?
I’ve seen it on the supposedly best option out there, Qobuz, after all.
I tried finding a report button to bring this to TIDAL’s attention. To no avail.
Later in the same playlist, one of the many bands that I enjoy had a very evidently AI-generated album art that didn’t go with their previous album art style at all, the song title wasn’t all too alarming, the music was a bit off but could still work.
After I found THREE such cases in the same playlist, I decided it’s enough.
Again, I couldn’t find a report button despite looking very thoroughly.
I filled out a contact form and received an automated receipt. I kindly made them aware of the problem in the hope they’ll fix it. They were considered a good service, after all. I even suggested they could implement a button especially for this and asked them if they plan to implement an AI tagging system like Deezer has.
Shortly after this incident, I put TIDAL on web on my laptop and saw notifications about new songs from my artist.
One that got me especially pissed off is a very old rock band that didn’t bring out anything new in ages. I know there’s talks about a potential album, but I strongly believe that my usual music media of choice would cover a new release if it was happening.
Instead, I got another (very) possibly AI-generated album cover that doesn’t align with any of the band’s previous releases (they have a very distinct style), and a title written in cyrillic.
Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt at first, I checked the song out.
It wouldn’t be the first time that bands stylise titles or something.
But when I heard a Russian guy doing something that balances mumble rap and trap, I knew for sure that it is one of those cases again.
This time, I did not bother reporting things. Instead, I checked the web for answers. There MUST be a reporting function of sorts that I’m just too blind to find.
Instead, I found many online posts, social media entries, reels, shorts and reddit posts and comments. According to reddit (which has to be taken with a grain of salt, especially these days), I learned that this seems to be going on for the longest time. I don’t listen to a lot of mainstream-popular music (at least in comparison), so maybe my artists weren’t yet affected that much and it only started recently.
Bummed out, I continued paying for the service but admittedly, I used it much less than normal. Instead, I focused on self-education and reading more about Deezer and ROKK again. I know better than to use those pre-made playlists but it doesn’t change the fact that the platform I considered to be good started crumbling a long time ago.
My final straw was an update that I was a bit late to make. It broke my app.
Or, not so much the update as what followed after.
After updating, I was automatically logged out which never happened to me with any other update. I was also not able to log back in. Angry, I tried to contact the customer service.
Hoping to catch a human on the chat, I opened it.
Of course, it was a clanker, so when I said please connect to human, it said it’d send a ticket. Close enough, huh? Well, the useless chatbot opened a customer service ticket before I was able to finish typing my explanation. But the ticket confirmation came with an e-mail address which I was able to use. Attaching a screenshot of the error warning, I typed away.
I expressed my disappointment over them going on with chatbots that can’t even wait until the customer enquiry is ready to be sent and the situation with the update itself.
Using the occasion, I brushed over the metadata allocation issue that I already addressed but never received an answer for.
Somewhat shortly after I’ve sent the e-mail, the app worked just fine.
A couple hours later, I had a reply, which looked very copy paste, informing me that there was an issue but it was resolved.
My commentary about the chatbot not even letting me finish my text before it generated the ticket and the tagging issue were skilfully ignored.
This was it for me.
Since my co-paying family members knew of my thoughts of leaving TIDAL, I did so yesterday morning, just in time before the renewal. Phew.
I want to stress that for a while it was genuinely a great service. With its flaws just like any other online thing, but overall solid.
But it’s a couple months now that I was thinking of leaving TIDAL for Deezer, on and off. Especially when reading such great things from them.
See, Deezer has a very good use of AI: trying to filter out AI-generated content, so that they can tag it as such.
Fight fire with fire, then. It’s for a good cause so I’m all for it.
There’s a section of the FAQ dedicated to this and I love their stance. Let me quote:
Can this feature be turned off?
No - it is imperative that we are transparent with you regarding the
content you are listening to, including if some of that content is AI-
generated.
I’d normally disapprove of the use of the word CONTENT, but Deezer offers some podcasts, after all, so fair enough, I guess.
I would prefer it if they didn’t allow AI generated music at all, but I am also pro freedom of choice. At least on Deezer, unlike other platforms, the listener has a chance to make an informed decision. The system is by far not foolproof, AI tools are getting better every day and I am so certain that I’ve heard a lot of AI music without even knowing it. But this is a step in the right direction and first and foremost a stance that they are taking. I deeply respect this effort alone.
Also yesterday, when catching up with stuff and reading more on the issues with TIDAL that other people experience, I read that Qobuz wants to implement AI-tagging as well.
I am tempted to give them a new chance sometime down the road, to see if they improved on the tagging problems that drove me away from them initially.
But for now, Deezer is the place to go.
An update to my previous experience with Deezer is also the REALLY SMOOTH playlist transfer tool, so I dind’t need a third-party app for this time.
Only ONE song was not recognised.
I bet my behind that there’s some AI-technology involved in this process, but this is the actually useful, non-invasive and non-harmful kind of, so I’ll take it.
What I also did was re-subscribing to ROKK. Purely out of conviction.
Maybe having access to less music will actually be beneficial for me?
I noticed that while I love to have a wide selection, I got a bit overwhelmed.
And with all the good stuff Deezer does, there’s still those darn pre-created playlists.
The issue most likely is not as bad as on spotify, but still. But again, more on that in the essay. My ROKK main page doesn’t have this playlisting thing like the major apps, which I find very refreshing.
As I’m typing this piece I’m enjoying a fab band recommendation by ROKK, which doesn’t have much to do with the previously listened album, but fits my taste quite well.
I wonder what kind of algorithm ROKK uses, there’s been some random Korean songs in the mix after my album finished. But so far, my reintroduction to the service is positive.
One of the first bands I’ve looked up has an incomplete discography, but at least for the time being, I have Deezer to substitute for that. And honestly, it doesn’t matter that much anymore. If I’m a true fan I own the CD already or it’s on my buying list.
For right now, the absolutely biggest disadvantage with ROKK is the playlist transfer, which is another good reason to keep Deezer and hopefully an initiative to declutter those a little.
One playlist has multiple thousand songs, as it’s the “liked” songs from my earliest spotify days that I carried on through all those platform changes. I think a lot of songs can go soon.
As I listen to a 2025 album by this freshly discovered band, which might end up in my review, I notice that for the first time in a couple months I feel quite excited to listen to (new) music again. The phase of me yearning for comforting, familiar sounds on my DAP seem to be gone.
Laziness does not pay off and it can be harmful.
If you love music to any capacity, listen to it with intention. Don’t just consume, which is such a thing that spotify and other streaming services taught us to do.
Be present, pay attention to the melodies, let the music do its magic.
Yes, I am typing this now while listening to music because it helps me focus.
Bet your booty that I’ll re-listen at least twice before giving it a verdict, properly with no distraction!
It is possible to consume music ethically by buying it. But if streaming is your only option or a preferred option, choose wisely and pay attention to details and changes in the service you use. Vote with your own money and don’t let your love for something become a harmful thing.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
