As more music-streaming programs are released with every year the spotlight has recently shifted to services Spotify and Tidal. According to TIME magazine Spotify is one of the top music streaming services amongst others such as Songza and Google Play Music. However, what sets Spotify apart from the others are its song library and its cost. With about 30 million songs Spotify offers a wide range of music for its users free free, unless one wants to use the ad-free Premium option at $9.99 a month.

In comparison Tidal was released in 2014 and is only accessed via a monthly subscription at either $9.99 per month or $19.99 per month for a high-fidelity version. According to its website its goals are to, “Support the artists, create a sustainable music industry, and deliver the high quality music and experiences that fans crave.”

The biggest distinction between Tidal and Spotify comes from Tidal’s push for high-fidelity music. High fidelity is the reproduction of sound with as little distortions as possible. Tidal claims that it streams music at 1411 kilobytes per second (kbps) versus Spotify’s 360 kbps song quality.

On its website, Tidal also emphasizes how it releases exclusive content from its artists. One of the first major exclusive releases was Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé's music video for their single “Feelin’ Myself." Other exclusives, according to Billboard, are footage from singer Alicia Key’s “Set the World on Fire” Tour at Madison Square Garden as well as content from Taylor Swift, who recently removed all of her work from Spotify.

Swift’s decision to take her music down was a result of the programs low-royalty streaming and her belief that artists should be properly paid for their work. On its website Spotify states that the “payout to rights holders [is] between $0.006 and $0.0084 [per stream].” This meanw that artists are making less than one cent each time someone streams their music on the service. Although the site also stated that the payout for their Premium users is considerably higher, there are about 20 million Premium users out of the over 75 million active accounts.

In an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal, Swift said, “Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.”

Despite the financial setbacks from Spotify, it’s still able to provide a large amount of decent quality music at no cost to its users. Although Tidal provides a higher-quality sound, users have commented that it is not worth both the price and the amount of data taken up by the better-sounding music files.

While both programs have their own drawbacks and advantages, it appears to be too soon to see which, if either, will become the next major music streaming service — especially in light of the just-launched Apple Music streaming service.

Music streaming technology is an ever-changing battlefield, and ultimately, it will be consumers and fans who select the winner, not the artists.