You may have never heard Madonna’sLike A Virginthe way she heard it when she recorded it in the studio 33 years ago, but now you may. Tidal on Thursday launched Tidal Masters, an initiative that will see the streaming service offer thousands of songs from its catalog to HiFi subscription members at the same level of audio quality as their master recordings.
Tidal partnered with British technology companyMusic Quality Authenticated(MQA) to become the first of the major on-demand music subscription services to allow fans to hear master quality audio. Simply put, a master recording is the initial, raw recording of a song that an artist makes before it is encoded into multiple different audio formats. MQA takes the master recording, digitally processes it while retaining all of the sounds from the original recording that would be lost when being converted to such smaller formats like MP3, and then delivers it in a form small enough to be downloaded and/or streamed. So, those faint sounds you never knew existed on your favorite CD will be front and center in a mastered copy.
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This is quite an ambitious endeavor, one that Jay Z’s streaming service may have jumped the gun on a bit. The website says HiFi members will have access to “thousands of master-quality albums” and “over 30,000 tracks” in master sound quality. At time of publication, there are only 199 albums in the Master section. A PR rep for Tidal informed Digital trend the Master section is not the full amount of albums with master quality audio, but a curated collection of albums. Fans will be able to know which albums are included by playing the album and seeing if the status bar next on the playback readsMASTERor simplyHIFI.
The collection of albums in the Master section are not categorized by genre, artist, or anything identifiable, and are not in alphabetical order, similar to theWhat’s Newsection where Tidal debuts new albums and singles. That could mean as Tidal adds more master quality content — as the website states it will — the newer additions will be at the top and not necessarily based on what year they were released.
Master-quality audio is the latest feature Tidal has added in the past year. Tidal has supportedoffline playbackfor videos since at least February 2016, when the streaming service debuted the second season ofMoney & Violence,the popular YouTube series. It beat Netflix bynearlya full year, and is still the only on-demand music streaming service to offer such a game-changing feature.
Two years ago, Tidal owner Jay ZexplainedTidal’s place in the on-demand subscription music wars by stating the competition “can be McDonald’s, we’ll be Shake Shack.” Only time will tell if mastered-quality songs will be the company’s secret sauce or a nice topping to an already impressive main dish.
