Tidal Pricing and the EU

All Things Music
1

Hi,
In a recent (23rd December) article from John.Darko, he discusses the Tidal service tiers, as the FOC provision to reviewers has been ended.

In the article Tidal Hi-fi or Hi-fi Plus? It’s an easy choice! | Darko.Audio he discusses Tidal Plus at €13.99/month and Hifi at €7.49/month, and I thought hold-on is that a promotional offer, but no that’s the price available to John in either Lisbon or Berlin, both EU countries.
For the last number of years, I have been paying €19.99/month for Hifi Plus (based in Ireland), and I know this tier is £19.99/month in the UK and $19.99/month in the US.

Tidal cannot provide a suitable explanation as to why the same Internet-based service, that has no physical deliverable element in any of these countries, has different pricing applied, just it uses your IP address to determine your location.
This is a service delivered over the Internet, there is no local Customer Support involving personnel etc. no data centres for each country, etc., unless they can explain what is different, but I have had 6 responses from Tidal and they haven’t been able to justify the differential pricing.

I understand why different pricing for those countries using different currencies such as £, $, Yen etc. but would have expected an EU-wide price, as you get with Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Netflix, Paramount+, Disney, Qobuz, Roon etc.

So what are other EU-based forum members paying for Tidal Plus?
Any other regions?

Also, the UK is getting the worse deal here, as there never was $ to £ equivalency, € to £ parity existed briefly a few years ago, and is now back to a steady 0.85 (certainly under 0.9 but above 0.8).

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I asked myself the same question, then I remembered I saw almost the same article on another website.

At first I thought it was maybe an article written by Srajan Ebaen and the price might be from Cyprus, but I was wrong:

  • Srajan lives in Switzerland now
  • The article on Darko is attributed to John
  • The other article I saw is by the other “Darko” contributor Michael Lavorgna, on Twittering Machines

I think it IS the price in Portugal
I’m too lazy to VPN to confirm, but I googled and found that price on more than one page

Here in France it’s 10,99/19,99€, same in Germany and most of EU
Somes eastern EU countries pay less. Romania seems to be around 6/12€, Poland pays something like 4/9€ (still in złoty)

I think there might be local costs for network/bandwidth or local music catalogs they have to negociate… but I don’t think it matters in the end
It’s probably just based on the cost of living in the country and what people are able to pay. If it’s too high, they’re just losing subscribers and losing money

There is a reason some clothes, carpets or floor tiles are made in Portugal, cheapest french cars are made in Romania… wages are really different. Both countries are in the EU and use €

Twitch, another “service delivered over the Internet” had to change the value of the subscriptions. Everything was based on US price and it was way too high for some countries. And they began with Mexico, Turkey, India, etc. where it made the biggest difference

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Yes, Just looking for transparency when there is no EU wide pricing, and differentiated pricing is being applied.

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