“I went to Oklahoma to shoot with Wayne Coyne,” says Macta. “He appears to be wearing one of those helmets that has a ventilation system for your protection, a metal puffer jacket, and big silver moon boots.” They couldn’t hear a single word Coyne said in the helmet, so the frontman went home and shot the promo video himself: “How to pronounce this weird word ‘ko-buzz’.”
Cubuz “How Do You Say It?” Asks questions after. The possibility is “Can I transfer my music library?” and “Is it everything?” Answer: yes and About. Case in point: I recently switched to Qobuz after almost 20 years with Spotify. (Emotional.) I used a third-party service called Soundies to transfer my songs; The port took half an afternoon, and the hit rate of my playlist was over 90 percent.
One Million Club
I’m not the only one, according to Macta, who came to Qobuz after working at major and indie record labels for years – 2025 was a banner year for the 19-year-old company. Twelve months ago, Qobuz had approximately 500,000 subscribers. The French streamer had been growing steadily since 2007, targeting “people who already knew what hi-res music was” with a catalog of over 100 million tracks of lossless CD-quality and 24-bit music.
The first winds of change came with Liz Pelly’s January 2025 book mood machinewhich criticized Spotify’s business practices, including interviews with former employees and artists demanding fair industry economics. As Macta says, “It’s not a music company; music was just a means to an end.” This reignited disputes over underpayment among artists and Qobuz’s daily US test numbers began to increase.
In mid-October, free-tier users began posting ICE recruitment ads they saw on Spotify, which went viral on TikTok and Instagram Reels. “The day that story came out was our biggest day ever in America,” Macta says. Qobuz saw another surge in numbers, which remained steady until Spotify’s own marketing convinced more people to make the switch in early December. “The second best day was Spotify Wrapped,” he says. Qobuz upset everyone from audiophiles and “conscious consumers” responding to boycotts like Death to Spotify and Indivisible, to K-pop superfans searching for high-quality downloads.
Qobuz now has 1.2 million active monthly users, and its streaming revenue is expected to grow 45.7 percent in 2025, while total paid music streaming grew 8.8 percent. About a third of its revenue now comes from the US, its biggest market. They are still in small numbers behind Spotify (293 million paid subscribers) and Apple Music (over 100 million). “For us to say we’re going to compete with Apple or Amazon,” says Macta, “might as well be saying we’re trying to launch a rocket.” Qobuz aims to reach 1 percent of the paid streaming market; Under its French CEO Denis Thébaud, it is expected to reach profitability by March 2027.
high payout
For years, Qobuz has been lamenting in posts artists being paid “a quarter cent per stream” on larger platforms, while “much higher numbers” are paid on Qobuz. Digital payment structures can be unclear for labels and rights holders to enter into, with less transparency, unclear payment thresholds and, as in the past, conflicts between labels and artists. But across multiple evaluations and artist anecdotes, Qobuz has the highest payouts per stream, outpacing rival high-resolution music service Tidal and, in some cases, paying five to six times more than Spotify.
The average per-stream rate is an artificial metric that does not reflect how everyone is paid. But in March 2025, the company released that all-important 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 numbers so we thought we’d give it a go,” Macta says. “Anyone else want to tell us what’s theirs? They don’t.” Spotify’s average per-stream Category That’s about $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, or $3 to $5 per 1,000 streams.
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