Tidal VS Amazon Music Unlimited [Full Comparison 2024]

By Miley Swift Updated on 2023-07-31 / Update for Tidal Tips

Whether you're working in your office or spending holidays in your home, you'd always want to enjoy soothing and immersive music with high quality to relax and make you feel better. Thanks to ever-evolving technology, you can now have many music streaming platforms that have multiple plans and allow you to listen to millions of outstanding songs with those service plans.

Many people, especially audiophiles, get in a dilemma to choose Amazon Music Unlimited or Tidal HiFi Plus. Considering people's demands, we've decided to present the difference between Amazon Music Unlimited vs Tidal HiFi Plus, particularly the Amazon Music HD vs Tidal HiFi quality in this post. If you want to know which is better, please read on!

amazon music hd vs tidal

Part 1. Overview of Tidal HiFi Plus and Amazon Music Unlimited

First, let's have a look at what are Amazon Music Unlimited and the Tidal HiFi Plus plans, as well as their benefits and downsides.

Amazon Music Unlimited

Amazon Music Unlimited is one premium music plan of Amazon Music that allows you to explore 100 million songs mastered in Amazon Music HD quality. Beyond this, it provides a mounting catalog of tracks with spatial content such as Dolby Atmos. Also, there are four different services within the Amazon Music Unlimited subscription: Individual plan, Family plan, Single-device plan, and Student plan. You have a free period before renwal and a discount of 50% for students. However, please note that the Single-device plan does not offer spatial sound, Amazon Music HD, and Ultra HD quality.

Now, let us talk about the benefits and downsides of Amazon Music Unlimited below.

Pros

  • You can easily access over 100 million ad-free and high-bitrate songs in the Amazon Music HD and Ultra HD
  • It endows you with thousands of expert-curated playlists and stations
  • Support playing Amazon Music songs on supported devices and Alexa-enabled players whenever and wherever you like
  • Enable you to download tracks from Amazon Music for offline playback
  • Offer expert-programmed and exclusive playlists based on your listening habits

Cons

  • A little expensive than most music services
  • Without audiobooks and video content

Tidal HiFi Plus

Tidal HiFi Plus is also one of Tidal subscriptions besides Tidal HiFi. It features with high-fidelity audio, high-res-quality MQA music, Dolby Atmos, and Sony 360 Reality Audio, which Amazon Music lacks. Similar to Amazon Music Unlimited, Tidal HiFi Plus also covers four plans: Individual plan, Family plan, Student plan, and the Military/first responder plan. It also comes with a free trial before renewal such as Tidal free trial 6 months. Besides, Tidal gives students a 50% discount, and the military as well as the first responder a 60% discount.

Here are the pros and cons of Tidal HiFi that might help you spot the difference between Amazon Music Unlimited vs Tidal HiFi Plus.

Pros

  • Offer you stunning sound quality, Hi-Res audio, and over 110 million of ad-free songs
  • Comes with exclusive artist streams, live concerts, thousands of playlists and videos content
  • Students, the military people, and first responders can enjoy the brilliant discount
  • Offer Tidal subscribers in-time lyrics and download feature
  • Curated playlists based on music tastes

Cons

  • The subscription to HiFi Plus is pretty expensive
  • Only support downloading music on mobiles

Part 2. Subscription Plans and Cost

When you talk about Amazon Music HD vs Tidal HiFi price plans, the stand-out aspect about both these streaming platforms is the generosity to offer discounts for students, first responders, and military members. Both of them give subscribers a 30-day free trial and a 50% discount for students. But their subscription prices are different for different detailed plans. Here is a clear table to see which is more customer-friendly.

Individual Student Family Military First Responders Single-device plan
Amazon Music Unlimited $10.99/month $5.99/month $15.99/month × × $ 4.99/month
Tidal HiFi Plus $19.99/month $9.99/month $29.99/month $11.99/month $11.99/month ×

From the above chart, it indicates that Tidal HiFi Plus is much more pricey than Amazon Music Unlimited since Tidal provides higher music quality such as lossless MQA and 3D-effect Sony 360 Reality Audio. But it also provides the military and first responders with a 60% discount.

✨Vedict: Tidal HiFi Plus provides more plans, higher music quality, and discounts while Amazon Music Unlimited is cheaper.

Part 3. Availability and Compatibility

As far as the availability and compatibility of Amazon Music Unlimited vs Tidal HiFi Plus are concerned, they both are compatible with iPhone, web, desktop, Apple TV, and Android devices. Furthermore, both of them empower you to listen to downloaded music in their own app due to copyright protection.

It would be a wise decision to use a smart speaker if you're opting for Amazon Music Unlimited since it also provides a lower price. Connecting with smart speakers like Echo Studio will make your sound quality pretty impressive and high quality. Moreover, you also can opt for Google devices to listen to Amazon Music HD and Ultra HD-quality audio, but you'll get pretty limited features going in this route.

On the other hand, you can cast Tidal music to Google devices, Nest, Sonos, and Echo via Tidal Connect with Tidal HiFi Plus plan. Tidal partners with the most popular devices and players. And it also supports Amazon Alexa. If you want to check whether your device supports playing Tidal music, please visit this web page: https://tidal.com/supported-devices.

✨Verdict: Amazon Music wins since it supports you to download music on both mobiles and computers.

Note: if you want to download Tidal music for playing it on your desktop and any other devices, you can go for AudFree Tidal Music Converter. It is a tool for both Tidal music free users and subscribers to convert and download Tidal music to MP3, FLAC, AAC, WAV, M4A, and M4B for offline use anywhere and anytime. And it can save the lossless quality of Tidal songs after converting. Most importantly, with it, you can play Tidal music on all devices and platforms anywhere and anytime without limitations even though you cancel Tidal subscriptions.


Part 4. Tidal VS Amazon Music HD

Sound quality has to be the paramount aspect whenever you decide to go for a music streaming service. When you talk about the difference between Tidal and Amazon Music sound quality, you should never miss this part. A comparison table display Amazon Music HD vs Tidal HiFi/Master.

Bit Rate Format Dolby Atmos Sony 360 Reality Audio
Amazon Music HD 850 kbps FLAC ×
Amazon Music Ultra HD 3,730 kbps FLAC ×
Tidal Master 2,304 - 9,216 kbps FLAC, WAV
Tidal HiFi 1411 kbps FLAC

✨Verdict: Tidal HiFi Plus wins on account that it provides more spatial content like 360 Reality Audio and much higher music quality.

Part 5. Music Library

The music library size of Tidal HiFi Plus and Amazon Music Unlimited is also a significant factor when comparing the two plans.

Amazon Music Unlimited covers over 100 million HD-quality songs and millions of songs in Ultra-HD-quality songs. However, it only allows you to stream only featured 100 million of content, including playlists, tracks, albums, and top stations. Distinct from Tidal, Amazon Music lacks music videos and synced lyrics for its subscribers.

Tidal HiFi Plus includes over 110 ad-free tracks. Besides, Tidal HiFi and HiFi Plus also allow you to access 650 K+ exclusive music videos, including documentaries, concert streams, music videos, movies, and more. It is worth mentioning that now, Tidal shows lyrics for its HiFi and HiFi Plus users.

✨Verdict: Tidal wins because it provides lyrics and curated videos for users which Amazon Music lacks.

Part 6. User Experiences

All the users we've reached out to about their experience using Tidal Master and Amazon Music Unlimited gave us pretty surprising ideas.

Since Tidal HiFi Plus comes with Master Quality Authenticated technology (MQA) to create and deliver guaranteed master recordings to Tidal users, many people termed this music streaming platform the best. Apart from containing massive sound quality, Tidal also allows you to stream larger music files without any fuss.

Unfortunately, you won't find this facility with Amazon Music Unlimited. However, this thing doesn't make it any bad. Instead, Amazon Music Unlimited is also a pretty credible streaming platform that has been used immensely by its subscribers.

Overall, if you go by their users' comments, these two platforms are surely worth your attention, and you can try acquiring their services at some stage.

Verdict: Draws

Part 7. Conclusion

Which is worth subscribing to, Amazon Music Unlimited or Tidal HiFi Plus? It is tough to separate Amazon Music Unlimited vs Tidal HiFi Plus as both plans provide extraordinary services for their users. However, if you've got Amazon's Prime membership, you can take priority to the Amazon Music Unlimited option. But, if you're an audiophile and looking to enjoy music with extraordinary sound quality, you can give a shot to Tidal HiFi Plus.

These platforms come with 30 days of the free trial version, meaning you can explore their features for free. You can look into the credentials of both music streaming platforms before going for the premium package. We're hopeful that this review will help you make a better decision.

Miley Swift

Miley Swift

Staff Editor

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Miley Swift is a professional content creator in the field of music entertainment and tech. Passionate about Tidal streaming technology, she is adept in offering and updating relevant tech skills and tools of Tidal music.