Best $24/year gift?

If you are a subscriber to Tidal and have friends that are interested in music treat them to a year of Tidal premium. It costs you an extra $10/month to add a family membership that gives you 5 other people that you can share the service with. I have used this as a gift to friends that learn what high quality streaming can do for them. I have 5 friends that thank me regularly for the gift. Share some audio love with your friends.

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Thanks for the reminder, I had forgotten.
Chas

I suppose this approach opens up another possibility. Six people could organize to sign up for one family membership at $30 per month, or $360 for the year. Divided 6 ways that comes out to $5 per months for Tidal HiFi under the family umbrella. Everyone could pay $60 upfront to one person who would be responsible for paying the monthly fee.

A collective bargaining approach :thinking:. Stick it to the man :joy:

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I saw a nice LP double LP of van Morrison in our local Velvet record shop.

Pay once, play forever.

CD version is also available, you can rip it and share with family, even on mobile devices. Lossless red book CD quality.

Same applies, pay once, play forever.

I refuse to let my music listening hobby depend on license fees.

I don’t like license fee software either and stay away from it. Already have enough bills to take care off for the essentials in living, don’t need more of them on a voluntary basis.

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If $5 a month for almost unlimited musical access causes that much strain on your financial well being then I’m not sure why you feel the need to comment in this thread at all other than to push your personal view.

Simple answer. Because it’s a public thread to all forum members, who all have different opinions.

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In all fairness, Rudolf has not stated he cannot afford the subscription fee, only that he does not like ongoing fees. Many prefer owning something outright without ongoing payments.

I do however object to his position one can rip a CD and share with family. No, please do not do this. This is theft. While artists are poorly compensated by streaming services at least they receive something. But they get nothing when you steal their music.

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This message is modified.
Elk explained below what he meant and I don’t think anymore that he was accusing my case.

With ”share with the family” I mean: family living at the same address being my wife and children. The house listens / streams / syncs from the same server. That is not considered illegal. I do not rip and provide copies outside our household for which I am financially not responsible. Every piece of music in our home is paid for.

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It’s called family sharing in iTunes and the amount of syncing devices are limited.

Sorry, Rudolf, but we can only respond to that which you actually post.

The topic is sharing Tidal with five additional people as a gift to friends via a “family membership.” These people would not be in the same household as those in the household would already have previous access to the Tidal subscription. Your suggestion of “rip it and share” CDs appeared to indicate one could similarly share with others via illegal copies.

Thank you for the clarification.

No hard feelings then. Thank you for the clarification. I’ll adjust above post.

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Very gracious of you.

I am sensitive to illegally copying music, probably overly so. There are too many people of rip CDs, keep a copy, and sell the original CD. Others sell servers with music on them using this as a selling point. Etc.

I find this disturbing as we are cheating the very artists we enjoy and listen to. Most artists make a modest income and are practicing their art because their soul tells them they must. This applies to musicians, dancers, sculptors, all artists. We need to support them or we will lose a a great deal.

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Elk:

Along your lines of supporting artists. I probably go to around 100 live shows a year at the Dakota Jazz club in Minneapolis. (season pass is a great deal). Anyways, I try to buy any albums or music from the artist directly at these shows as I believe that I am getting them more cash than if I buy the music from anywhere else. I honestly don’t understand how some of these musicians are making a living. The economics of the industry is puzzling to me right now.

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I am absolutely 100% in agreement with you on the above. And that is one of the reasons I am truly interested in the complete PS Audio Octave Music / Provider and Streaming service. No license fee and yet fair paiment of the artists.

Our neighbor is full time musician, composer organ player in our Church. He composes, teaches, directs and perform Christmas Oratoria every 2 years in the Amsterdam Concert Hall, fully booked every time they perform and I attend every performance and buy the CD, a really high quality recording.

He can feed his family and pay the bills. His glass is always half full and he is ever so friendly. It’s indeed for most good performing artists a hardly earned income.

Besides, although my music may be ripped, I still love to spin the discs. I mentioned it before, it may be emotional, but I feel it’s always an experience.

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Great stuff, guys!

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The debate of whether or not it’s ok to rip and share a CD with a friend is really a dated argument made more and more obsolete by technology. I see zero moral issue with sharing a copy of my purchased CD with a friend - if I could find one who was interested.

With music services, honestly, only my audiophile friends would even be remotely interested and most of those are so saturated with enormous collections that it’s a big yawn. None of my non-audiophile friends could care less about sharing a CD because they have everything on their service of choice. For me, these days music sharing is more about curation, about letting friends know about gems you’ve found, which they then play instantly on their service. That’s how it is in my circle of friends.

Yes, sweeping piracy like the torrent site Apollo, or whatever is left of that arena (who wants to hassle with that anyway?) which are done on a large scale, is absolutely wrong. But sharing a CD with a friend, I’m ok with that. It can help the artist by creating a new fan who may buy a ticket one day. And regardless what the RIAA says, I feel its my cosmic right to share in that way, on that small scale. Because no one I know cares, it’s really just a philosophical debate, like which horse and buggy setup one prefers, or how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

That’s what is. The CD was unwittingly a Trojan horse that disrupted a very shady corporate structure and then consumed itself. Quite remarkable when you think about it, for better or worse. Protect and covet the CD all you want, but it’s the CD that destroyed recorded music profits for most artists, like sand slipping through fingers. If you’re an artist, the CD is really not your friend. It was always a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Live shows are something technology can never take away. If I were an artist, I’d make all my music free in hopes of building a larger and larger live fan base. It’s a model The Grateful Dead pioneered to great success, and something Chance The Rapper does today. Taken from a 2017 Vanity Fair article:

: L.R.: How and why do you still give your music away for free? And how do you make money?

CHANCE: After I made my second mixtape and gave it away online, my plan was to sign with a label and figure out my music from there. But after meeting with the three major labels, I realized my strength was being able to offer my best work to people without any limit on it. My first two projects are on places where you can get music for free. With Coloring Book , Apple had it on their streaming service exclusively for two weeks for free—and then it was available on all the places my earlier work is still available on. I make money from touring and selling merchandise, and I honestly believe if you put effort into something and you execute properly, you don’t necessarily have to go through the traditional ways.”

Just lend them your CD to trial and then they can buy their own copy. 62 years ago, I would walk down to a little one room record shop, where he would spin 45’s for us. We bought what we liked, Little Richard was my must have.
Chas

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Same applies to all intellectual property, my wife is an author and her work is routinely used part and parcel by other authors or lecturers who use her words and images. I am fine with paying what I think is fair for music or books etc but it’s important the folks whose efforts we enjoy see recompense.

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Exactly, this is critically important.

No one would argue owning a paperback of a book entitles one to go into a bookstore to steal another. Yet when it comes to the digital version people assert all sorts of rationalizations why it is acceptable to make an illegal copy and give it to another.

For some reason, too many equate ease of copying with I am entitled to steal it.

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I think part of the intellectual value issue is there is no physical piece to hold or look at and our monkey brains aren’t really developed enough to accept things we cannot touch as having any kind of real value. This thought maybe over simplified but you get the jist.
I always try to compensate for things that I feel that I own including music but I think it comes from being able to hold those pieces back in the day. Someone who is young enough to have only heard music coming from their phone or streaming service really has no way to place a value on that item. They don’t have a good way to place value on a lot of things as the handling of money has almost disappeared.
If an object magically shows up on your phone or computer screen it must be free, right?

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