Qobuz Is the Anti-Spotify Music Streamer You’ve Been Waiting For

When Dan Mackta, Qobuz’s New York–based managing director, was looking for musicians to endorse the euphony streaming work aft its US motorboat successful 2019, helium tapped up a friend—the manager of the Flaming Lips. It was mid-pandemic levels of tricky.

“I flew to Oklahoma to sprout with Wayne Coyne,” Mackta says. “He shows up wearing 1 of those helmets, with the ventilation strategy to support you, a metallic puffer overgarment and large metallic satellite boots.” They couldn’t perceive a connection Coyne said successful the helmet, truthful the frontman went location and changeable the promo video himself: “How to pronounce this weird connection ‘ko-buzz.’”

The Qobuz questions aft “How bash you accidental it?” are apt “Can I transportation my euphony room across?” and “Does it person everything?” The answers: yes and almost. Case successful point: I precocious switched to Qobuz, aft astir 20 years with Spotify. (Emotional.) I utilized a third-party work called Soundizz to transportation my songs; it took fractional an day to port, with a much than 90 percent deed complaint for my playlists.

One Million Club

I'm not alone, according to Mackta, who landed astatine Qobuz aft years astatine large and indie grounds labels—2025 was a banner twelvemonth for the 19-year-old company. Twelve months ago, Qobuz had astir 500,000 subscribers. The French streamer had grown steadily since 2007, targeting “people who already knew what hi-res euphony was” with its 100 million–plus catalog of lossless CD-quality and 24-bit music.

The archetypal winds of alteration arrived with Liz Pelly’s January 2025 publication Mood Machine, which criticized Spotify’s concern practices, featuring interviews with erstwhile employees and artists calling for fairer manufacture economics. As Mackta puts it, “This is not a euphony company; euphony was conscionable a means to an end.” It renewed the scuttlebutt amongst artists astir debased payouts, and Qobuz’s regular US proceedings numbers started to prime up.

In mid-October, free-tier users started posting the ICE recruitment ads they saw connected Spotify, which went viral connected TikTok and Instagram Reels. “The time that communicative broke was our biggest time ever successful the US,” Mackta says. Qobuz saw different spike successful numbers, plateauing until Spotify’s ain selling convinced much radical to power successful aboriginal December. “The 2nd champion time was Spotify Wrapped,” helium says. Qobuz hoovered up everyone from audiophiles and “conscious consumers” responding to boycotts similar Death to Spotify and Indivisible, to K-pop superfans searching for high-quality downloads.

Qobuz present has 1.2 cardinal progressive monthly users, and its streaming gross changeable up 45.7 percent successful 2025, compared to 8.8 percent maturation successful wide paid euphony streaming. Around a 3rd of its gross present comes from the US, its biggest market. Those are inactive teeny numbers adjacent to Spotify (293 cardinal paid subscribers) and Apple Music (more than 100 million). “For america to accidental we're gonna vie with Apple oregon Amazon,” Mackta says, “we mightiness arsenic good accidental we're trying to motorboat a rocket.” Qobuz’s extremity is to scope 1 percent of the paid streaming market; nether its French CEO Denis Thébaud, it expects to scope profitability by March 2027.

Higher Payouts

For years, Qobuz had popped up successful posts by artists bemoaning being paid “a 4th of a cent per stream” connected large platforms versus “a overmuch higher number” connected Qobuz. Wading into integer outgo structures to labels and rights holders tin get murky, with debased transparency, vague payout ranges and, aforesaid arsenic it ever was, conflicts betwixt labels and artists. But successful aggregate evaluations and creator anecdotes, Qobuz has the highest pay-per-stream, edging retired rival hi-res euphony work Tidal and, successful immoderate cases, paying retired 5 to six times arsenic overmuch arsenic Spotify.

An mean per-stream complaint is an artificial metric, which doesn’t bespeak however everyone gets paid. But successful March 2025, the institution released that all-important number, verified by an autarkic auditor: Qobuz pays an mean of $0.01873 per stream, oregon $18.73 per 1,000 streams. “We knew we had the champion fig truthful we thought we’ll conscionable laic it down,” Mackta says. “Anyone other privation to archer america what theirs is? They don’t.” Spotify’s mean per-stream range is astir $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, oregon $3 to $5 per 1,000 streams.