And for editorial content, the staff at Qobuz puts together articles dubbed Panoramas as an exploration into artists fundamental to shaping their genres (see Figure 1). Additionally, Qobuz includes digital booklets for millions of albums in its catalog, showcasing lyrics and additional art, as carefully created by the artist. Qobuz emphasizes discovering and cleaning up metadata, and filling in the story of how a piece of music came to be and which people made it happen. Beyond CD quality, you can find 24-bit music in its catalog, including higher sample rates of 96 kHz and 192 kHz, as heard in the studio. For much music, that is CD quality at 44.1 kHz/16-bit. For sound quality, Qobuz believes in delivering music to your ears in the highest resolution possible. Let’s briefly explore those three areas of improved service. When I asked Mackta about what makes Qobuz different, he reiterated the three advertised strengths of Qobuz: “The largest available library of streaming hi-res music, focus on quality of metadata, and context.”įigure 1: Qobuz Panoramas delve deep into the making of influential music. doing a whole bunch of stuff now that’s never been done before.” It should be noted that the US has never had a hi-res streaming service primarily marketed to audiophiles.Īnd Qobuz has plans to outdo Tidal. Solomon said, ”Our big plan is we’re going to augment our profitability with downloads promoting the audio industry, which will promote us back, and then promoting artists who will promote back. I spoke at length about this with David Solomon, the Chief Hi-Res Music Evangelist of Qobuz. And Tidal, the only hi-res streaming service in the US until Qobuz’s 2019 launch, is in a pattern of losing tens of millions each year. Spotify has never had a profitable year since it was founded in 2006. So, why would anyone try to enter the US market, especially operating it from Europe?” HighResAudio is not wrong. “None of the exciting streaming service are profitable. Some consider this a dangerous move: German company HighResAudio said that it considered expanding to the US, but opted not to because of music licensing fees.
But that changes in 2019 with an expansion to North American shores.
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Though it was founded a full seven years before Tidal, Qobuz may not have reached your ears because it was initially focused on Europe. They felt that serious music fans were not being addressed in the online music space.” And in the intervening years, “it evolved into a full-service, all-genre streaming service.”
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On the company’s history, Mackta said, “Qobuz was started in France in 2007 as a hi-res download store by classical music fanatics. I recently chatted with Dan Mackta, Managing Director of Qobuz US. The Paris, France-based company aims to outclass all the other streaming services on three fronts: sound quality, documentation, and editorial content. But there’s another contender that you might not have heard much about: Qobuz. Enthusiasts were again pleased when Tidal announced in 2017 that it would begin streaming hi-res audio. You’re probably familiar with Tidal: the streaming company that made a splash in the audio community in 2014 when it brought lossless CD-quality streaming to the US, UK, and Canada. Now you don’t have to choose: You can have the convenience of streaming, as well the quality of lossless CD audio and higher, using one of two services. This is where hi-res streaming enters the conversation. That’s fine for listening while cooking or driving, but not for system calibration, and not for an old-fashion listening session.
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