Interesting numbers from Qobuz, a french music streaming service. But the press releases have slightly different emphasis on being european in the different languages.
The first paragraph of this press release in german reads (translated):
Qobuz proves that a European alternative that relies on sound quality and human curation can also find its audience in a mass market dominated by tech giants and achieve a positive balance.
In the french and english version it reads:
The success story of an independent French company that has become a global player alongside the music streaming giants.
It seems they only emphasize being european in the german press release, it’s missing from the english and french version.
They’re humble about it, but the revenue share that they pay to rights holders (which is then paid to artists) dwarfs every other big player in the streaming industry. Based qobuz.
Able to comment on availability of music on the platform? I’d hope they have pretty much everything if they’re paying more than others but it’s never that simple.
I switched from Apple Music yesterday. Most of my library was transferred, except from a few of my favorite albums (early albums from Carpenter Brut or Perturbator that wold be very hard to buy today) and a few singles. Weirdly, some very obscure black metal bands are available but not some mainstream singles from the 90’.
Everything I haven’t been able to find on bandcamp has been on qobuz and vice versa - I dont use the streaming section of either but I assume the catalogues between their download store and streaming are the same. Qobuz is pretty good coverage!
I switched from Spotify to Qobuz and I’ve only missed two artists in my regular mix of ~30. And for one of them only their old albums are missing, the new ones are uploaded. They probably changed labels.
I’ve emailed some labels to notify them about specific albums not being available on Qobuz. It worked one time and the album is now available. Most of the time it takes only one click at their digital distributor to opt-in to Qobuz.
That might just be a function of popularity and scale though. Spotify has 750M active users. Qobuz (by this article) reached 1.2M in 2025.
They might be paying more from the goodness of their hearts or they might be paying more because they have no leverage. As the artist, if you get roughly 70x more streamings but each streaming is half the price, you’re gonna get more money obviously.
Sure but evidently it is proving to be a profitable and sustainable business model
Does it? My understanding is that it’s approximately 70% of revenue which is in line with basically every other player in the space.
If that’s the case then they’re simply making more revenue per stream and clearly users are still on board so end result is qobuz wins users win and artists win
Edit: I say this because their “artists get X amount per stream on average” value is far higher than other players in the industry
Following this logic, artists get more value from users if the users stream music less, since there will be a lower total amount of streams, making each stream be a larger share of the monthly fee they pay to the platform.
Which is clearly not the case - the artists still get to share the €13 the users pay per month, regardless of how many streams they actually happen to play in any given month.
The truth is that “pay per stream” as a metric to compare music streaming services has always been pretty much meaningless
That is a valid point.