{"id":31244,"date":"2026-07-14T05:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T09:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=31244"},"modified":"2026-06-29T12:24:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T16:24:11","slug":"the-qobuz-about-high-quality-streaming-audio-part-2-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/14\/the-qobuz-about-high-quality-streaming-audio-part-2-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Qo)Buz About High Quality Streaming Audio (Part 2 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

The Human Element<\/b>
\nWhile some services cater to listeners interested in the latest pop single, Qobuz takes a more curated, intelligent view. \u201cWe\u2019re very album-focused,\u201d Mackta explains. \u201cWhen you open up the app, it\u2019s like walking into a record store.\u201d He says that Qobuz has been designed with an old-school mindset. Whereas some services make use of admittedly sophisticated scientific algorithms to offer suggestions for listeners, Qobuz is built on a foundation of human curation. \u201cQobuz is intended for active<\/i> music listeners,\u201d he emphasizes. \u201cPeople like you and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan Mackta readily acknowledges that the advent of widespread music streaming brought with it some challenges. \u201cAnd the amount of \u2018music\u2019 being delivered has grown exponentially in the age of artificial intelligence,\u201d he says. He places quotes around \u201cmusic\u201d in this context for a good reason. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of\u2026 junk,\u201d he admits. \u201cThere\u2019s vacuum cleaner sounds and white noise, and 90% of it has only been listened to once, if that.\u201d But because Qobuz employs actual human beings to curate its content, subscribers won\u2019t have to wade through a sea of audio garbage. \u201cYou\u2019ll never see that [stuff] on your home page; it\u2019ll never be recommended to you,\u201d he says. To find it, \u201cyou\u2019d have to be looking for it,\u201d he adds with a laugh. \u201cWhich you wouldn’t be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Because of its foundational emphasis on sound quality, Qobuz has attracted a subscriber base that values the same thing. \u201cGenres like classical music, jazz and rock are big among that crowd,\u201d Mackta says. He notes that mainstream artists like Billie Eilish and Fleetwood Mac are popular among the Qobuz listener base as well. \u201cWe have a very diverse group of music listeners,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve got plenty of listeners who are streaming Chappell Roan all day, but [overall streams] are definitely skewed more toward music that isn\u2019t on the current pop charts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Respect for Artists <\/b>
\nOne of the charges often leveled at streaming services is that their minuscule payouts fail to provide fair remuneration to the artists who made the music. Complicating the discussion is the fact that few streaming services release the actual figures, leaving the numbers open to speculation. What is known is that Spotify \u2013 one of the biggest players in the music streaming marketplace \u2013 is estimated to pay approximately $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. That works out to just over four dollars for 1,000 streams of a track.<\/p>\n

Many streaming services offer a free subscription tier, supported by advertising. That kind of setup brings in much less revenue, and the associated costs are passed on to the paid subscribers. That leaves less money for artist payouts. Mackta concedes that Qobuz has been historically \u201ca little bit more expensive\u201d than some other streaming services, but notes that while Spotify and others have been raising their prices of late, Qobuz has largely held steady.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s not that our model is different,\u201d Mackta says, \u201cbut our setup, our scale and our focus give us a much higher per-stream rate\u201d to the artists. Qobuz is transparent in this regard. \u201cWe\u2019re the only service that has announced our per-stream rate,\u201d Mackta says. Audited figures released in 2025 showed that Qobuz paid an average per-stream rate of $0.018732 to rights holders \u2013 distributors, publishers and record labels \u2013 who then pay artists. Extrapolated to a theoretical 1000 streams, that represents about $18.73, more than 4.5 times what Spotify is estimated to pay. Mackta says that Qobuz\u2019s status as a company that\u2019s not publicly traded on stock exchanges allows that degree of openness, \u201cbecause we don\u2019t have to worry about every [public] statement affecting share price.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, because Qobuz\u2019s download store is a significant part of its business model, Mackta says that the company\u2019s payout to artists is even higher than it would otherwise be. \u201cThe payout for digital downloads are closer to [those for] physical media in terms of the money flowing back to the artists,\u201d he explains. \u201cWe believe that everybody benefits from [Qobuz offering] that option.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Future of Music Streaming<\/b>
\nFor music lovers, Qobuz\u2019s model provides three strong advantages: an extraordinarily deep catalog, fair compensation to artists, and unparalleled audio quality for a superb listening experience. And Mackta says that all of that is just the beginning. With that in mind, innovation in line with its core principles points the way toward Qobuz\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Mackta says that existing available technology has limited the quality of audio streamed over wireless headphones. \u201cWhile it has gotten better in recent years, Bluetooth is always lossy,\u201d he explains. But change is on the horizon. Mackta floats the idea of being able to walk around one\u2019s home with wireless headphones, listen to high resolution streaming on Qobuz, and then walk outside and having a chip [in the headset] connect via Bluetooth with your phone so that the music continues to play \u2013 all seamlessly. \u201cThe technology doesn\u2019t exist quite yet,\u201d he cautions, \u201cbut the first wireless headphones should be coming to an electronics store near you by this Christmas. And we\u2019re working on ways to make sure Qobuz is part of that.\u201d Low-power wi-fi streaming is likely to be the latest game-changer in a constantly and rapidly evolving technology space.<\/p>\n

Dan Mackta notes that the word is getting around about Qobuz. \u201cIn the last six months, the size of Qobuz\u2019s paying audience has more than doubled,\u201d he says, noting that the surge was driven by listener-led viral buzz on social media, not any sort of company-driven media campaign. \u201cThe challenge for Qobuz going forward,\u201d he says, \u201cis to keep making sure that we\u2019re appealing to a lot of people while staying cool and quirky.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One\u2026 The Human Element While some services cater to listeners interested in the latest pop single, Qobuz takes a more curated, intelligent view. \u201cWe\u2019re very album-focused,\u201d Mackta […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,3668],"tags":[5925],"class_list":["post-31244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-music-business","tag-qobuz","cat-41-id","cat-3668-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31244"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31776,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31244\/revisions\/31776"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}