Why I left Spotify for Qobuz
Choosing 'Boutique' over 'Big,' with a bonus for the personal touch.
Last weekend’s article Why I Quit Spotify hit a nerve here on Substack - or perhaps, because we all love music, I should say it struck a chord, a nice big open-string E major resonating loudly into the back rows and the streets beyond. If I was all about the numbers, I might want to boast how many views it had in relation to my other posts, but one of the many reasons I got off Spotify is because of its obsession with numbers, or rather, the obsession it creates for us with its obsession with its numbers. (Stephan Kunze has an excellent article on his Zensounds colum about how a similar obsession with “eyeballs” at so-called-music-journalism websites only downgraded the medium until it was worthless.)
Hey everyone, this is an especially long weekend read; it’s probably best enjoyed over coffee, or a late-night glass of wine, sitting at your desk or on your couch with your laptop, rather than a phone. I post snappier articles with my Midweek Update. If you haven’t already susbscribed, pleased do. If you are on the free plan, please consider an upgrade; writing is my craft, and I would like it to continue to provide my income, in part via this patronage model. Thank you!
Unanswered within last weekend’s article, however, was the question as to where I went in Spotify’s place – because, let me be clear, and despite the occasional comm(itm)ent from those who resist them, there is no going back from streaming platforms; even as I blanche at what streaming does to musicians’ incomes, I appreciate the benefits I can get from access to so much music at such relatively little cost and would therefore like to have a subscription service I can believe in.
But is there one? I was never going to swap out Spotify for Apple, not at this stage of the game, and not when I made a conscious decision five years back to get off Macs and their unwarranted dependency on Apple’s monopolistic proprietary hardware-software. Nor am I going to give Jeff Bezos a single penny I don’t have to, so Amazon was off the table too. YouTube Music is similarly not for me, for a whole number of reasons – not least that, like these other major options, it’s too effing major; there’s no point complaining about one rapacious capitalist monster only to just swap it for another.
Deezer offers many of the same bells-and-whistles as Spotify, and apparently some additional ones like videos and song-identification, but though it is clearly established in the international market, nobody I know enthuses about the French-owned company, and word=of-mouth – or sometimes the lack of it – is important in a decision like this.
And while Bandcamp, Mixcloud and Soundcloud all have their benefits for both the discovery and dissemination of new, independent and artist-driven music, Bandcamp especially, none of them qualify as the sort of subscription-based streaming platforms with deep major label catalogues to replace Spotify.
So, what did that leave? Tidal, for one, which I’ll come back to in a moment. But the answer, my friends, is that I unsubscribed from Spotify because I had happily subscribed to Qobuz.
Who, what, where? you might ask, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. For a while there, Qobuz was just another of the oddly named optional additional platforms I noticed when uploading my own music via Soundrop, along Anghami, Boomplay/Ayoba, Jaxxter, Peloton, Resso and more, most of which, now I actually bother to look into it, are international streaming platforms.1
Qobuz is also international, assuming you’re one of my readers who doesn’t live in France, where the company was founded and still run from. Then again, you’d hardly know as much from its name, which is actually derived from the Central Asian horsehair-stringed ‘Kobyz’ instrument, considered both sacred and shamanic in Kazakhstan and beyond. This itself should give you an idea of Qobuz’s lofty goals and reference points, as well as an excellent legit word for Scrabble. Launched way back in 2008, the same year as Spotify, with a retroactively stated intent “to offer the digital world the aspects of music fandom that audiophiles, those who love music best, have always cherished,” Qobus has stayed off in the mainstreaming margins throughout its 15-year run, quietly developing a reputation as leading contender for those who desire hi-res audio from a music streaming service.
And among those who do desire such quality is my younger son Noel, the one I keep banging on about because he’s a really good musician/mixing engineer currently studying music production at University and available for inexpensive hiring from his website here. While he has an overly distracted eye for the shiny new object/platform/software, he also has a highly acute ear that obsesses over quality and finesse of sound, the small details that define a great production, and which can render a Spotify playback so much worse than one on Tidal or Qobuz.
Two or three years ago, Noel had us try out Tidal. I liked the concept of its higher-quality audio, even though there remains that part of me that believes good music should sound as good coming out of a phone speaker in the middle of traffic, where not even your dog can discern the high flute buried at the back of the mix let alone the bass line someone worked so hard on in the studio, as on your home hi-fi audio system that may have set you back four or five figures and on which you can hear the flautist’s every breath and the bassist plucking their strings.
But Tidal came at a premium cost, and it was hard to see what we got for that premium. Jay-Z was involved by this point, and it was said to be artist-friendly/owned as a result, and there were so-called exclusives, but Noel found it little more than an inferior Spotify imitation, especially as it branded into podcasts and videos, and its semi-proprietary partnership with the company MQA was exposed as an audio sham, in large part by a YouTuber (see above). But it wasn’t just your everyday user who felt cheated. Good old Neil Young pulled his catalogue in disgust that the MQA acronym allowed Tidal to affix a ‘Master’ citation on his music; he described the sound instead as “hocus pocus file manipulation” and “a degradation of the original”. In the same undated post that linked to 850 pages of negative comments about the MQA sound degradation, Young recommended Qobuz as one of just two platforms (the other being Amazon HD) where “the real music – exactly as made by the artists and producers – is played.”
Noel paid for Tidal at a student rate of $5 a month until he gave up, feeling disappointed if not outright conned, but continued searching, and more recently, he recommended Qobuz himself as a better, more credible alternative to Spotify, having signed up for a free one-month trial and been impressed by the results. Eventually, as Spotify’s recent business decisions collectively weighed on my conscience, I decided to give Qobuz a try.
And I’m happy to say that I’m happy with it. Very happy with it, as events of the last seven days confirm.
Let’s discuss the audio quality first. While it may not be your number 1 priority, it’s important to know what you are listening to and what other options you have. Quick recap: CDs – the benchmark for sound quality for decades now – are rendered out at 16-bit/44.1 kHz; consider that the current ground floor. Qobuz offers all its music at that base professional level, which is more than Apple or Spotify have traditionally done, and additionally allows you to take an elevator up to the penthouse and executive suites by offering sound quality at 24-bit up to 96 kHZ, and 24-bit up to 192 kHz, assuming they have been supplied with such files (and as almost most new songs will meet at least the 24/44.1 standard).
Of course, there are many people out there, including those in the audiophile world, who insist humans can’t hear the difference, besides which, in the digital world, better usually means bigger, and Qobuz will let you know should you try choosing such quality in your car on your mobile data, that your phone will effectively explode under the pressure of bandwidth. But as Noel informed me while discussing this article, there are studies showing that laypeople can recognize the compromises that exist when music is recorded at 44kHz as opposed to 48kHz and higher, implying that it’s sometimes what we can’t hear, as opposed to what we can hear at these higher resolution qualities, that makes the actual difference. (Expect more music going forwards to be recorded at 24/48 and higher.)
Anyways, for those with mobile data streaming limits and a healthy disregard for the high-end audio penthouse– “just give me the music, Goddamnit!” - you can take that same elevator down to the lo-fi basement with an MP3 at 320kbps, which is the default for files your friends send you, and the one at which I upload my podcasts. It is also, more or less, the same audio quality offered by Apple’s AAC format on Apple Music and old iTunes, and by Spotify via the open-source OGG format, confirming what I noted above, that Qobuz’s base format of CD-quality is inherently superior to the long-standing base format of Apple or Spotify.
I can confirm that Qobuz is living up to this goal: the magazine (and therefore the app itself) offers curated recommendations across multiple genres, all written by actual human music fans who double as professional journalists. The magazine has four sections: “articles” that subdivide into Music News (like the “10 Artists to See at Glastonbury”) and Editor’s Picks; “panoramas” that appear to be deep dives into an artist’s back story and catalogue; “hi-fi” (mainly reviews of hardware and interfaces I have never heard of); and “interviews,” all of which are captured on video and additionally shared on YouTube, per this one below with Devandra Bernhardt from January:
Meantime, many of the albums I called up also feature Qobuz-unique reviews (from R.E.M.’s 30-year old monster Automatic for the People to the little known Bill McKay’s lovely new Locust Land). Special playlists are produced, promoted and annotated almost daily, with a universal weekly New Releases list drawing from the editorial team’s own personal choices, and serving just as effectively as the Spotify Release Radar that attempted to second-guess my own tastes. The Qobuz playlists are timely too, such as the one shown below, which cropped up, with accompanying copy, almost as soon as James Chance passed away last week. An article on the late Françoise Hardy appeared with similar speed, and you can access some of it here.) Even if you don’t come for the hi-res audio, you should certainly stick around for the editorial, and I for one am certainly not going to balk at a platform that invests time and money in quality music journalism.
This editorial is effective. Qobuz has already turned me on to the K-punk trio Sailor Honeymoon, who, to quote Sujan Hong from the QobuzGuide to May 2024 magazine article, which itself comes accompanied by a 34-song, 2hrs, 40 minute playlist, “layer fuzzed-out guitars with art school cool for their self-titled debut EP.” That’s certainly one way of describing it: another would be to say that the song ‘Fxxk Urself’ from that 8-track EP, which modulates and speeds up in real-time playing with every line of its last, oft-repeated chorus, will not easily be confused with classical or jazz, and that if you too would like some off-kilter music amidst the mainstream, there will be plenty of it recommended your way on Qobuz.
The focus on music and the people who make it continues through one of the elements that gave us reason to hate Apple, Spotify and others: Qobuz does not bury the credits away somewhere you have to find them, but builds them into a song’s “front page” (for want of a better term). On your phone, simply scroll up with your finger and a fresh window unveils itself with all the credits that Qobuz themselves were supplied with; ironically it’s a little more complicated on your browser, requiring you to open the song as full page display at which a ‘credits’ option pops up above the sleeve.
Separately, and perhaps uniquely, from the release page you can follow a link to a page listing all releases/artists on the pertinent record labels - be it the dominant UME down to Drag City and below - which harks back to the days when many of us based our purchases on blind faith in a proven record label’s own proven tastes.
An additional major draw for Qobuz, though it is not the reason I signed up, is the ability to purchase audio files in any range of quality. As Noel notes later, some people do enjoy owning their music outright, and would as soon purchase it from a music-friendly platform as from a record shop. For then, a premium ‘Sublime’ subscription offers up to 60% discount for around 40% more per month which, if they’re purchasing more than a couple of albums a month, will almost certainly bring them out ahed. (As with streaming, the rights-holders get 70% of the purchase fee.)
Meantime, Qobuz’s regular subscription fees – for single, duo, or a six-person family plan - are right in line with the other major platforms, and its claim to host over 100,000,000 titles war borne out after the remarkably swift and painless process by which I transferred over all my playlists (and other selected artists, songs and albums) from Spotify via Qobuz’s recommended third-party intermediary, Soundiiiz. Turned out that the absolute vast majority – like 95%+ - of what I had on Spotify is also available on Qobuz. Going forwards, there’s no need for any artist NOT to hit the ‘select all’ button with their distro such as Distrokid or Soundrop, unless they have a particular beef that week with one particular company, i.e. unless they’re from the Neil Young school of righteous indignation.
That reference to playlists is important; the ability to compile and curate such playlists is every bit as easy on Qobuz as on Spotify, along with the ‘listen offline’ and ‘favorites’ options. Of course, Search engines work well, and due to its dedication and relentless focus on music alone, the platform overall feels clean, streamlined (see my playlists page below), and rather than bombing your landing page with promoted new releases (per Spotify), Qobuz encourages you to find your away around its own recommended releases. The only thing likely to distract you from finding and listening to music is the accompanying articles, and that is no bad thing.
All these positives not discounted, I feel compelled to say that the research I have conducted for this article suggests that, as of today, many people out there believe Tidal is the better option if you’re in the niche market that wants quality, and don’t care about Tidal’s rather untidy past. (My Noel most certainly does, and offered his own critique of Tidal vs. Spotify at my request on the eve of publishing this article, and which I am including as an endnote.2) You can read an informed discussion here on Reddit and a presumably impartial comparison study here. Tidal recently reduced its subscription fees, will be eliminating its last so-called MQA songs by the end of July, and is also now in the market for hi-res purchasing capabilities. At the same time, the big players are increasingly offering hi-res audio on their own platforms. The Qobuz owners may be looking on and recognizing imitation as flattery but also wondering if they will get buried by these more powerful rivals.
But that might be where Qobuz’s boutique nature wins the day. When I discovered that I can’t embed my playlists or even song choices on Substack despite Qobuz having an embed option, I reached out to customer support via the online chat. Now, Substack, as readers may be aware, employs AI for its online chat, and I have to admit its damn effective, so when someone on Qobuz pertaining to be called Charles got back to me pretty quick (and admitted that while playlists can be embedded into proper websites, like the Shindig! magazine site that shares its own monthly playlist via Qobuz, they can’t be embedded into frames-based platforms like Substack), I asked for confirmation. Charles assured me that he was very much a real person, and our interaction since has been top-notch.
For example, when I followed up by asking whether there was an artist portal so I could get profiles and bios up for my two majorly minor acts, he said that No, a portal was not yet available (these things cost the sort of sums only a Spotify or Apple can afford), but if I just sent him the info here and now, he’d get it online for me in a few days. The profile pic for The Dear Boys went online while I was writing this article; I’m impressed, especially as Apple demands you meet its stringent photographic standards if you want such a pic on their platform, which I take as an insult to artistic integrity.
Suitably satisfied by this combination of sound quality, editorial content, relative ease of use and the personal touch, I finally canceled my Spotify subscription, and decided to write a column entitled ‘Why I Quit Spotify for Qobuz.’ However, being me, i.e. verbose, I wrote too much and for the third weekend long read in a row, realized I needed to split it into two articles. So it became simply ‘Why I Quit Spotify’ with the teaser that I would reveal its replacement next post.
But then a funny thing happened on my way to writing this follow-up. (Continued below the recap.)
Why I quit Spotify
Only a few hours after ‘Why I Quit Spotify’ went online last Sunday morning, I got a DM on Substack from one Kenn Richards. He said that we knew each other back in NYC - though I feel like I knew everyone in the music world back in my NYC days and couldn’t place him immediately - and thanked me for the “beautiful read.” He introduced himself as the person “currently managing partners at Qobuz,” and wondered “if you have tried us.”
I was immediately impressed that someone at a streaming service would be paying attention to the Substack wires on what I had to presume was his day off, but I also just figured that someone had turned him on to the article, and he was merely doing right by the company he works for. When I checked, however, he’d actually subscribed to my Substack the previous week. Funny how the world works, eh?
Rather than DM, I lined up a phone call, figuring – correctly – that he’d get a kick out of knowing that similarly, I’d already subscribed to Qobuz, and that my article had originally been intended to say as much. Indeed, we had a great video chat – I was able to place him from working at various indie companies I had frequent contact with back in the 1990s – and it was evident that he’s a music fan first and foremost, happy to be working for a company that likewise places music front and center; within moments we were exchanging links to each other’s own music on Qobuz. A week later, Qobuz is still the only company that has reached out to me from that article.
That personal touch is based not on just on enthusiasm, but out of necessity. Kenn verified that Qobuz is a mere minnow amongst whales, with only eight employees in the USA, and eighty globally - Spotify, he said, has 1500 in the US alone – and while happily explaining the reasons behind certain limitations I had come across and promising to see what he could personally fix for me, he preferred that I leave on-the-record citations to the US Managing Director Dan Mackta. Dan e-mailed me his mobile number, with a message to just call him. I guess Qobuz is still that kind of company.
Dan came on board in 2017, a year before the US launch, after a long stint in the music business, from Jive/RCA to 4AD. During our conversation, he told me more about the company’s history and business model. Started by a pair of French tech music enthusiasts in 2007, a year before Spotify launched, it was purchased in 2015 by the French businessman Denis Thébaud, through his company Xandrie, which considers itself “the leading international specialist in digital culture and entertainment.” (Many of Thébaud successes have been in the world of video games, which may help explain why most of the other companies Xandrie either owns outright or holds major investments in are unfamiliar names to me.)
Though clearly wealthy, it’s incredibly hard to find information about Thébaud, who remains the company’s chairman. There is no Wiki page I can find, only a few short profiles in French business magazines, and he stopped tweeting back in 2018 at which point he had amassed all of 80 followers. What we do know is that he loves jazz and classical music (I found a picture of him, printed below, seated on the left left at a grand piano, before a Qobuz “press meeting”), he is a devout audiophile, he has steered Qobuz towards his tastes and musical ethics, and his approach to building the company would appear to be one of continued integrity, steady improvements and slow but sure growth.
Qobuz, clearly, is small, but that’s relative in the streaming world, the company claiming around 1,000,000 users in the USA (not to be read as 1,000,000 subscribers). And its relatively concise business history comes as a relief in comparison to the historical controversies and multiple side-hustles surrounding Tidal and Spotify. By staying true to its business model, Mackta told me, Qobuz is on track to break even in two years, and that it only needs 1% of the streaming market to be wildly profitable.
Getting to that 1% is nonetheless a slow process, especially when up against those whales that some would consider sharks in disguise. And more short-term investment in the tech team, based in France, is sorely needed IMHO if it does not want to get left behind. The issue of embedding a Qobuz playlist on a frames-based platform like Substack, for example, is apparently not a quick fix. For now, us Substackers can use our ‘Custom button’ option, and though it’s none so pretty to look at as a shared playlist, it’s a similar one-click option, and so I pause to invite you to listen to my 2024 playlist thus far as imported from Spotify, and a separate, second one I have compiled exclusively from being on Qobuz.
While fixing this issue applies more to “influencers” than everyday users, those everyday users doneed Qobuz to enable us to synchronise our activity, so that when I come home from playing music on my phone, for example, and want to continue with the same album/playlist on my laptop, the app there picks up seamlessly, per Spotify or YouTube and presumably Apple and others. A fix of sorts is promised in the near future.
Still, while talking with Dan, it quickly became apparent that some of what Qobuz doesn’t offer is just as important as what it does.
For example, there are zero plans in place at Qobuz to incorporate podcasts, and while I lazily made the most of Spotify’s podcast pane, I have always maintained a standalone podcast platform account - I recommend Pocket Casts for those who want a free, simple but reliable platform – and welcome the opportunity to lose some of the many subscriptions I was carrying on Spotify.
Nor does Qobuz distract users with video clips (other than those video interviews on its magazine, something that may make it unique) or even accompanying lyrics. Audiobooks don’t even come into the discussion. This is a service dedicated purely to the high-quality streaming and sale of recorded music. Here’s another of their video interviews, to break up my relentless word count:
In the interest of full transparency, the conversations I had with Kenn and Dan have led to me being offered a complimentary “partner” subscription in which, in some ways, I serve as a beta tester, offering constructive feedback as per above and having regular dialogue with the company. I am all for being part of the music streaming solution, not just another person complaining, and I plan to accept: all readers should know that music journalists, especially those who go back to the days of physical product but including any of us who have ever been put on a guest list, historically have received free music (along with free lunches, travel and satin bomber jackets if you were doing this in the 1970s) as part of the process, and it’s a fake journalist who would allow that promo to colour their written opinions. I may yet opt instead for the family account to help get my partner and her kids off Spotify and as a reward to Noel for bringing me in on the service he recommended me to, especially as Qobuz is still a few months away from catching up to Tidal and others with a $5 monthly student subscription. I will keep you informed.
Any which way, the personal service, connections and dialogue with Qobuz has won me over beyond my initial impressions, and I’d certainly encourage you to risk following my lead, and give Qobuz a try. Its tech side is not perfect, but nor is that of any music streaming service, most certainly including Spotify, which revealed its multiple sluggish and bully-ish aspects over time. Besides, most of the music I love is full of imperfections. All I ever ask for is authenticity, and for now, with its dedication to the discovery of music, to high-quality audio for those who desire it, the ability to purchase music for keeps, for its depth of catalogue, its editorial content especially, its clean and attractive visuals, and its focus on giving artists their due credit, that’s what I am getting. Additionally, I appreciate that it lacks the controversies and penny-pinching history of its rivals, that it values musicians for their art and practice, puts emphasis on the credits behind the music, and that it appears to be living up to its lofty mission statement. Now, let’s go out there and enjoy this brave new world!
Anghami is Arabic, and Boomplay is African, to name two examples; in India, there are at least three major platforms all dedicated to domestic languages music.
From my son Noel, via e-mail: “While Tidal just feels like a Spotify rip-off that supposedly has "lossless", Qobuz feels like its own creation from scratch and with love, and it is much more transparent about what type of quality I'm listening to.
On Qobuz, I literally feel like I am putting on a CD, not just because of the quality difference, but because it is packaged and presented in the same way that makes putting on a CD such a better experience than streaming. Small details matter, like how the loading animation is the Qobuz logo rotating and not just a generic loading animation, to the fact that there's a literal magazine included, to the blurbs next to each album, to the ability to purchase music that isn't streamable anywhere without having to get a CD delivered. Tidal on the other hand brings nothing special or unique to the table, except for maybe the three-dimensional graphic design on the desktop app. In fact, Tidal wouldn't do gapless playback on the iOS app! That is unacceptable for any music player that costs money.”
First heard about Qobuz two years ago when bassist Christian McBride enthusiastically touted it from the stage of the Montclair Jazz Festival.
Fantastic write up, Tony! At the risk of sounding like a parrot, I will second everything you’ve said here (including that I have a similar “partner” account). Kenn Richards is a treasure trove of music history/stories and just an all around great person.
For me, it feels like they pulled the best parts of other platforms and fused them together with audiophiles like us in mind.
The writing is top notch. To be honest, I didn’t pay it muh attention originally; I figured it was on a par with blurbs on other platforms. That was a mistake. Turns out I’d been missing out on some great reads.
I have rarely had an issue finding a track I was looking for. I ran into more dead ends w/Amazon, to be honest.
The difference in sound quality vs. Spotify is huge— my hearing is not the best anymore and even I can hear/feel it.
At this point, not being able to embed a playlist to share is my biggest issue, but I hadn’t even thought of a custom button, so thank you for that!
At any rate, it’s a fantastic site that I hope can scale while not losing the personal touches that make it such a joy.