Tidal has released its first Apple Watch app, giving you the chance to either play offline music or stream without needing your iPhone nearby. You’ll need to link your Tidal account through a web browser, but after that you can blast your running playlist from your wrist at any time.
Tidal was available on Samsung watches before this, but otherwise wasn’t an option on wearable devices.
The service’s other major selling point is the amount it pays artists in royalties to stream their music. Analysis from Digital Music News puts Tidal’s rates ahead of Spotify, Apple, and Deezer, and it looks like this artist-supporting trend is set to continue after Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Square recently acquired a majority stake in the streaming service for $297 million. Dorsey specifically cited wanting to find “new ways for artists to support their work” as the reason for the acquisition.
“Square created ecosystems of tools for sellers & individuals and we’ll do the same for artists,” the CEO tweeted at the time, “We’ll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools, and new complementary revenue streams.”
Tidal’s Apple Watch support requires a Series 3 model or later running watchOS 7.1.
