Qobuz Offers a High-Fidelity Alternative to Spotify

When Dan Mackta, managing director of Qobuz based in New York, needed musicians to endorse the streaming platform after its US launch in 2019, he reached out to a friend,the manager of the Flaming Lips. The timing was tricky, smack in the middle of the pandemic. “I flew to Oklahoma to shoot with Wayne Coyne,” Mackta recalls. “He shows up wearing one of those helmets, with the ventilation system to protect you, a metallic puffer jacket and big silver moon boots.” Unable to hear a word Coyne said inside the helmet, the frontman went home and filmed the promotional video himself, explaining, “How to pronounce this weird word ‘ko-buzz.’”

After tackling pronunciation, the next questions from potential users are typically, “Can I transfer my music library across?” and “Does it have everything?” The short answers: yes and almost. I recently made the switch to Qobuz after nearly two decades on Spotify,a bittersweet move, admittedly. Using a third-party service called Soundizz, I transferred my songs in about half an afternoon, with more than 90 percent of my playlists successfully ported over.

Mackta, who joined Qobuz after years at major and independent record labels, says I’m far from alone. 2025 proved to be a standout year for the 19-year-old company. A year ago, Qobuz had roughly 500,000 subscribers. Since launching in 2007, the French streaming service had grown steadily, targeting audiophiles who “already knew what hi-res music was” with its catalog of over 100 million tracks in lossless CD-quality and 24-bit formats.

The momentum began shifting with the January 2025 release of Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, which took aim at Spotify’s business practices. The book featured interviews with former employees and artists calling for fairer industry economics. As Mackta puts it, “This is not a music company; music was just a means to an end.” The renewed criticism sparked conversations among artists about low payouts, and Qobuz saw a noticeable uptick in daily US trial sign-ups.

In mid-October, free-tier Spotify users began sharing ICE recruitment ads they spotted on the platform, a trend that went viral on TikTok and Instagram Reels. “The day that story broke was our biggest day ever in the US,” Mackta says. Qobuz experienced another surge in numbers, which plateaued until Spotify’s own marketing campaigns encouraged more people to switch in early December. “The second best day was Spotify Wrapped,” he adds. Qobuz attracted everyone from audiophiles and “conscious consumers” responding to boycotts like Death to Spotify and Indivisible, to K-pop superfans seeking high-quality downloads.

Today, Qobuz boasts 1.2 million active monthly users, and its streaming revenue surged 45.7 percent in 2025, compared to 8.8 percent growth in overall paid music streaming. About a third of its revenue now comes from the US, its largest market. Still, those numbers remain tiny next to Spotify’s 293 million paid subscribers and Apple Music’s over 100 million. “For us to say we’re gonna compete with Apple or Amazon,” Mackta acknowledges, “we might as well say we’re trying to launch a rocket.” Qobuz’s goal is to capture just 1 percent of the paid streaming market, and under French CEO Denis Thébaud, the company expects to reach profitability by March 2027.

For years, Qobuz has appeared in posts by artists frustrated with being paid “a quarter of a cent per stream” on major platforms versus “a much higher number” on Qobuz. Navigating digital payment structures to labels and rights holders is notoriously murky, with low transparency, vague payout ranges, and the same old conflicts between labels and artists. Yet in multiple evaluations and artist anecdotes, Qobuz offers the highest pay-per-stream, edging out rival hi-res service Tidal and, in some cases, paying five to six times more than Spotify.

The average per-stream rate is an artificial metric that doesn’t fully capture how everyone gets compensated. But in March 2025, Qobuz released that crucial number, verified by an independent auditor: Qobuz pays an average of $0.01873 per stream, or $18.73 per 1,000 streams. “We knew we had the best number so we thought we’ll just lay it down,” Mackta says. “Anyone else want to tell us what theirs is? They don’t.” For comparison, Spotify’s average per-stream range hovers around $0.003 to $0.005, or $3 to $5 per 1,000 streams.