Hey folks, fellow music enthusiast here. I’ve been using Tidal’s Hi-fi subscription for a year between Dec 2018 - Oct 2019, when I had to change my banks, and with that, of course, my cards.
I was very satisfied with their service, so I never had the need to reach out to their support team, until I had to interrupt my subscription briefly, while I switched banks and cards.
Upon trying to reactivate my subscription with the new debit MasterCard issued by the largest bank in my country (I live in a country that is in the European Union, so no shady stuff lol) I kept getting a pink error on Tidal’s checkout page, saying that the transaction cannot be completed, and it gave me a few general reasons as to why that may be, like incorrect card details - not applicable in my case, restrictions by my bank - also not applicable, they confirmed that there are no restrictions on their end and actually the transaction request from Tidal doesn’t even reach them.
At this point I realized that during my payment process on Tidal, I never saw the 3D secure popup, the one that sends you an SMS from your bank, and you have to input it. So from what I was able to gather, Tidal’s checkout is not 3D-secure compliant.
I also tried paying with PayPal, something which I was able to do for other online payments without a hitch. But on Tidal’s page, a PayPal payment attempt returns a dry error text “There was a problem with PayPal payment.”
I also tried with a VISA debit card from the same bank, but with the same result.
At this point I tried to reach out to Tidal support, to ask for help. And that’s when I discovered how terrible their support really is. I believe they are outsourcing their customer service, because I got in touch with them several times, and every time I had a strong feeling that they do not care too much about Tidal’s image to customers - having worked in customer service for a few years myself, I know that outsourcing your customer service to another company is the mother of mistakes, and a sure fire way to ruin your reputation, because you have no control over the quality of customer service rendered to your clients.
The first person I was in touch with, asked me if I tried to restart my subscription, after I explained in painstaking detail that I did, and how I did, in my initial message. After I’ve repeated that I have, and explained everything all over again, he said that he forwarded my feedback to their product team, and then I never heard back. Their product team did nothing about it too, because moths after our conversation, the issue persists to this day on their checkout page.
The second person I was in touch with, told me that “we cannot reverse this decision, very sorry”. I asked her what decision she was referring to, because to my knowledge there was no decision that I was aware of regarding my account.
I received a response from another person next, who told me that the payment is being rejected (something I was painfully aware of by now) and that I should contact my bank (even though I mentioned in my email that I have, etc.)
At this point, I am 6 months after my Tidal subscription was suspended, and basically ran out of options to try and send Tidal money. I have briefly considered Spotify but cannot reconcile with the fact that they stream 320kbps so I don’t really want that. Tidal in a way is unique, which is why it really f****g sucks that I cannot pay for their service.
One thing is for sure, this is the first company I begged to give them money, only to be met with total indifference and a complete lack of empathy.
Has anyone else had this problem with them, and if so, were you able to resolve it?
tried to connect from a different country tonight, and was not able to pay… with either method. Then I logged out, and created a new trial account.