If you’ve relied on Plex to get your Tidal music fix, the clock is ticking. Tidal will no longer be integrated with the media streaming service starting October 28, 2024.
That’s a big deal if you’ve not had any other way to listen to Tidal. (Which probably means for most end users it’s not that big of a deal.) It’s probably a slightly larger deal for Tidal itself, as you’d get a preview of the service in Plex’s music tab whether you actually had a Tidal subscription.
In the bigger scheme of things, this is unlikely to make even the faintest of ripples in the pond that is streaming music services. Spotify still leads the world with 626 million monthly active users as of the middle of 2024, with major competitors like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Tidal probably still remains a rounding error in that equation. In addition to being partly owned by musicians, Tidal’s claim to fame is that it offers higher-resolution playback than many of its competitors. (And especially Spotify, which continues to tease subscribers about Spotify HiFi.)
Probably the biggest loss would be someone with a major local music catalog that uses Plex to stream it anywhere, and then augments things with Tidal. Again, a pretty niche use case. The good news — or, really, the news that makes this mostly moot — is that Tidal has an app on pretty much every platform. So it’ll mean having to download and open up that app instead of just opening Plex and listening to music that way. (We could imagine some situation in which VPNs and Plex are preferred for bypassing geofencing, but that’s a niche case for a niche service.)
In fact, that’s basically what Plex said in its email announcing the breakup: “You may be asking, ‘what’s next?’ If you want to continue accessing their features and music, you will only be able to do so using the Tidal app. We recognize this may impact you greatly, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Actually, no. There’s a pretty good chance that it’s not going to impact anyone all that much — except maybe the folks at Plex who had to maintain the integration.
