It's like Jay-Z have no idea what kind of music streaming service he bought when he bought WiMP. TIDAL is being marketed like some sort of "Spotify killer" when WiMP which is Norwegian couldn't even compete with Spotify locally in Norway.

In case you don't know, WiMP was the name of TIDAL before it went international, and is as far as I know the second biggest streaming service in Norway.

I used it a couple of times when it was still called WiMP and thought it was really great partly because of the improved sound quality over Spotify, but mostly because of the editorially curated presentation of the content, with neat suggestions that was updated in accordance with local trends and events.

The app largely reflected what was going on in the Norwegian music scene, and in that way it was a much more personal app than Spotify ever have been or will be.

I haven't used TIDAL, so I'm just making guesses now, but it probably isn't offering that sort of personal content in any country, probably not Norway anymore either. Just in the US they'd need to have a different team for every independent state to be able to deliver locally relevant content for the whole country. Won't happen.

They've still got the 16-bit lossless files, and among the audiophile crowd there isn't really any other option considering the service is widely supported by big HI-FI names, like for instance McIntosh, Electrocompaniet, Linn, Meridian, and Wadia just to mention some, and of course Sonos and Bluesound.

In my opinion they kinda messed it up with TIDAL. WiMP never even got close to competing with Spotify in number of customers, but they were able to challenge Spotify on quality of the content. If TIDAL threw that content out, it's not really challenging Spotify with anything else than slightly better sound that no one except the extremely picky care about.

TL;DR TIDAL used to be better when it was a Norwegian service with locally relevant content.