Disclaimer: The following is not a sponsorship from Qobuz.
So you’re thinking about changing your ethical digital footprint and don’t know where to start. Let’s start with music streaming.
Most music streaming services are notorious for hiding royalty calculations behind NDAs and proprietary algorithms. Qobuz became the first, and so far only, streaming platform to hire an independent international auditing firm to verify and publicly disclose its exact royalty rate. And the cat is out of the bag:
Qobuz pays an average of $18.73 per 1,000 streams to rights holders.
By comparison, Spotify’s payout for 1,000 streams doesn’t even cover a Happy Meal — that’s somewhere between $3.00 and $5.00. Why so little? Thank the free tier and the ad model, which dilute the royalty pool down to crumbs. And it gets worse: Spotify only pays out an artist if their track hits 1,000 streams within a rolling 12-month period. Anything below that threshold is instantly demonetized, and whatever micro-earnings accumulated get absorbed into a giant pool that rewards the highest-performing mainstream artists.
That artist from Tulsa you think you’re supporting — the one working two jobs, taking care of family, still trying to make something from their music — they couldn’t break 1,000 plays for the year. So their earnings went straight to a top 10 Billboard artist. Congratulations. You just helped make Taylor Swift another dime richer.
Qobuz operates differently. Whether that Tulsa artist got five streams or ten, whatever is owed to them stays theirs. No pooling. No redistribution to the mainstream.
How is that possible?
Qobuz simply asks users to pay for the service. There is no free tier. It’s 100% subscription-based, which means every single stream is backed by a paying listener. Logically, that’s the only model where streaming music actually makes sense.
They also don’t rely on passive AI recommendation loops or algorithmic radio feeds. Every playlist on their homepage is curated by employed human editorial teams with genuine expertise. Reading their essays and reviews while listening to the music is genuinely one of my favourite parts of the experience. I don’t want to be a DJ splicing together a personal mashup. I want to hear the music as it was delivered, and read something written by a human being who actually cares about it. Outside of being at a live concert, this is the closest I’ve felt to music in years.
And that bit about hearing it fresh off the producer’s computer? That’s not hyperbole. The audio delivery is genuinely exceptional. Qobuz offers four streaming tiers:
- Basic MP3 — Comparable to Spotify’s standard quality. The audio is compressed to reduce file size. Not a true representation of the original recording.
- FLAC CD Quality — An exact replica of the CD. No data lost. The closest modern equivalent to carrying a Walkman.
- Studio Master — High-resolution audio; the standard for most contemporary studio recordings. As close as you can get to hearing a track straight from the session.
- Studio Master Max — The uncompressed master file itself. Essentially the producer handing you their finished recording directly. It doesn’t get better than this.
You get your money’s worth with Qobuz in a way you simply won’t with the big platforms.
The Bigger Picture
For the past few years, I’ve been paying closer attention to my ethical digital footprint. How I use social media, how I consume content, where my money actually goes. If there’s a way to support the underdog, I’ll take it, even when it costs me more. I’d rather know I’m backing a company whose values align with mine than default to convenience. That’s why I switched to Qobuz for music, and after nearly six months on the platform, this felt worth writing.
The social media integrations baked into the major streaming apps are a distraction strategy — a cheap trick to make users feel they’re on a social platform rather than a music service. They override what should be a straightforward listening experience and replace it with competitiveness, ego, and performance. An AI DJ. Turntable tools. Annual Wrapped posts engineered for Instagram. All of it exists so you don’t notice what’s being taken away: sound quality and fair artist compensation, traded in for the illusion of engagement.
If you’re spending hundreds of dollars on headphones, you should at least give them something worth hearing. It’s like choosing between organic produce and something heavily processed and preserved. The base ingredient is the same, but what’s been done to it matters.
It’s the same logic as your phone plan. Most of us are paying for data that exceeds what we actually use, yet when it comes to music, we accept compressed, degraded audio without question. We’ll stream Netflix in 4K but settle for low-quality MP3s on our music apps. We pick our poison.
And don’t even get me started on Spatial Audio or Dolby Surround Sound. These are among the most misguided ways to hear a recording. Artists and producers don’t mix their music with spatial remixing in mind. The finished master — what came off the producer’s desk — is the intended product. That’s what listeners should hear.
Is Qobuz Perfect?
I’m not saying Qobuz is perfect. Their catalogue isn’t as vast as Spotify’s, YouTube’s, or Apple’s. It’s a growing platform, and for most of what I’m looking for it covers about 95% of the ground. A big part of the gap is simply that many artists and listeners still haven’t heard of it. The name isn’t household yet.
But I think that can change. The more people learn about ethical digital practices, the more those practices become the expectation rather than the exception. If Qobuz ever earned the listener base of the top three, the catalogue would follow. And so would everything else.
Art by Oleksii Luchnikov — luchnikov.artstation.com