Qobuz payout – Qobuz, the French hi‑res music streamer, has surged in the U.S. after Spotify’s low‑payout debate, TikTok viral recruitment ads, and a growing wave of listeners moving libraries. In 2025 it reached 1.2 million active monthly users and reported a 45.7% jump in
The first time Dan Mackta saw Qobuz’s U.S. momentum turn into something measurable, it didn’t come from a polished campaign.
It came from free-tier users on Spotify posting the ICE recruitment ads they saw on Spotify—ads that spread across TikTok and Instagram Reels. Mackta. the New York–based managing director of Qobuz. calls the day the story broke “our biggest day ever in the US.” Then. as more people searched for alternatives. the numbers kept climbing—until Spotify’s own marketing pushed another wave of switchers in early December.
That mix of backlash. viral attention. and practical questions—“Can I transfer my music library across?” and “Does it have everything?”—is now shaping Qobuz’s pitch in the U.S. even as it remains a clear underdog in subscriber scale. Qobuz says it now has 1.2 million active monthly users, and it reported streaming revenue jumped 45.7% in 2025. Overall paid music streaming grew just 8.8% over the same period.
A listener moving across
For Qobuz, the hardest part isn’t convincing people the catalog exists. It’s helping them feel safe about the switch.
When Mackta talks about the questions prospective users ask, he sounds like he’s heard them in real time. The answers, he says, are mostly straightforward: “yes and almost.”
A recent switch story puts that into human terms. After nearly 20 years with Spotify, one listener moved to Qobuz using a third-party service called Soundizz. The transfer took half an afternoon and achieved a more than 90 percent hit rate for playlists.
That kind of detail matters when a service’s promise depends on what listeners already own—every saved album, every curated queue, every track history—rather than a fresh start.
From 500,000 subscribers to a 2025 surge
Qobuz’s growth has been steady for a long time, with roots dating back to 2007 and a focus on “people who already knew what hi-res music was.” The streamer has a 100 million–plus catalog of lossless CD-quality and 24-bit music.
But 2025 marked a noticeable shift. Twelve months earlier, Qobuz had around 500,000 subscribers. The company’s U.S. trial numbers began to pick up after a cultural pressure built around Spotify.
In January 2025, Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine landed with a message that many artists and listeners had been circling: Spotify’s business practices were criticized, with interviews with former employees and artists calling for fairer industry economics.
Mackta’s framing is blunt. “This is not a music company; music was just a means to an end.”
That critique helped fuel scuttlebutt among artists about low payouts, and then it spilled into the mainstream—first through social media virality, later through Spotify’s own moves that prompted additional comparisons and switches.
In mid-October, the ICE recruitment ads on Spotify went viral. Mackta says Qobuz saw another spike in numbers, then plateaued until early December, when Spotify’s marketing convinced more people to switch.
“The second best day was Spotify Wrapped,” he says, a line that captures how even the biggest platform’s yearly ritual can become a springboard for competitors.
Still small, aiming big
For all the momentum, Qobuz is not pretending it can match the giants overnight. Mackta places it in perspective: Spotify has 293 million paid subscribers, and Apple Music has more than 100 million.
Qobuz says roughly a third of its revenue comes from the US, its biggest market. Mackta describes the ambition in a way that feels more like engineering than branding.
“For us to say we’re gonna compete with Apple or Amazon,” he says, “we might as well say we’re trying to launch a rocket.”
The goal, he adds, is to reach 1 percent of the paid streaming market. Under French CEO Denis Thébaud, Qobuz expects to reach profitability by March 2027.
The payout numbers that won’t go away
For years, Qobuz has appeared in artists’ posts—especially those complaining about what they see as low payouts on major platforms. One recurring claim is that artists earn “a quarter of a cent per stream” on big services versus “a much higher number” on Qobuz.
The topic is complicated. Wading into digital payment structures to labels and rights holders can be murky. with low transparency. vague payout ranges. and conflicts between labels and artists. But Qobuz argues that in multiple evaluations and artist anecdotes. it offers the highest pay-per-stream. edging out rival hi-res service Tidal and. in some cases. paying out five to six times as much as Spotify.
It also has a figure that the company says it verified and published: in March 2025, Qobuz released what it calls the average per-stream rate, verified by an independent auditor. Qobuz pays an average of $0.01873 per stream, or $18.73 per 1,000 streams.
Mackta says the challenge is that other services won’t match that kind of transparency. “We knew we had the best number so we thought we’ll just lay it down,” he says. “Anyone else want to tell us what theirs is? They don’t.”
Spotify’s average per-stream range is given as around $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, or $3 to $5 per 1,000 streams.
A technical metric, but it lands like a moral one
An average per-stream rate is an artificial metric, and Mackta is careful to acknowledge that it doesn’t reflect how everyone gets paid. Still, the moment Qobuz points to a verified number, the conversation stops being only about taste and sound quality.
Because the streaming debate—how money moves, who gets shorted, who gets heard—has become a deciding factor for the exact audience Qobuz wants: audiophiles and “conscious consumers” responding to boycotts like Death to Spotify and Indivisible, plus K-pop superfans hunting for high-quality downloads.
Qobuz’s rapid 2025 lift looks. from the outside. like a clean competitive story: a hi-res alternative. a library migration that mostly works. and a public argument about payout fairness. But the details Mackta points to—one viral recruitment ad day. one post-Spotify marketing stall. one published per-stream number—suggest a different driver.
People aren’t just switching for better audio.
They’re switching because they feel time has run out on how music business claims are translated into payouts.
Qobuz Spotify hi-res music music streaming digital payouts music industry Liz Pelly Mood Machine ICE recruitment ads TikTok Instagram Reels Soundizz Wayne Coyne Flaming Lips Denis Thébaud