Here’s a song I just found!
Discovering new music is fun and the millions of tracks on streaming services are a goldmine for music lovers. Unfortunately, music links you receive from friends are often useless because they link to a streaming service you don’t subscribe to.
That problem may be about to become a thing of the past. Streaming service Tidal is now reaching out to competitors by offering universal links that apply across streaming services.
From now on, when you share a track in Tidal with others, you will get a link that looks like a regular Tidal link, but if you look at the code, a “u” has been added at the end:
tidal.com/browse/track/106257794/u
When you copypaste the link to a browser, you don’t get Tidal’s web player on the screen, but rather a menu where you can choose between opening the track in five music services so far: Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and Amazon Music. If the track is not available on any of the services, it is greyed out.
So far, only Tidal’s playback programme for computers includes the ability to share music across services. It will be interesting to see if competitors take Tidal’s outstretched hand and offer the same openness to their customers. But here at the editorial office, we can only applaud this excellent initiative. An initiative that comes in the same month that Tidal surprised everyone by halving the price of their best subscription.
How to share a track with everyone
To share music across services, you need the Tidal desktop application for Windows or Mac.
- Select the track you want to share and right-click on the three dots…
- Select Share, Copy track link
- Now you can send the link to all your friends without worrying about which music service they use.
Qobuz is not on the list yet, but Tidal is working on expanding the number of supported music services.