I have both…If I have to keep only one, that would be Qobuz because there are way more hi res music on Qobuz than MQA music on Tidal, and that trends is accelerating…
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Well I am afraid that the points you make do not really add up.
Firstly when you reach 40 million or 70 million tracks these become meaningless numbers for the consumer. You will never in your life listen to 40 or 70 million different tracks. In fact most of those tracks for either service will never be accessed by anybody. A few years ago Spotify revealed that 80% of the tracks held on its servers were never accessed. i am sure that a similar figure exists for other streaming service. When you have 40 or 70 million tracks, 30 or 50 million of them are going to be pretty obscure. What really counts is that the tracks that you want to hear are on the service.
I have no idea why you think that Tidal is cheaper than Qobuz. You say that a Tidal is $19.99 per month for HiFi ? Qobuz normally uses the same units of currency for pricing in the USA and the UK so £12.49 per month should be $12.49 in the USA. That is the cheapest by buying an annual subscription. If you want to pay monthly then it is $14.49, still much cheaper than Tidal. For that you not only get CD resolution but tens of thousands of genuine hi-res tracks ( <24/192 FLAC) whereas Tidal’s hi-res offerings are solely those encoded with MQA requiring suitably equipped hardware and which seem to predominately come only from only two major record companies, UMG or Warners.
The question of partners is always changing but an important factor is that Qobuz has only been available in the USA for two years. Further it is not available in all territories , particularly the Far East where much audio hardware comes from.
Given the above and your requirement for offline playback it would seem that you may do better by swapping to Qobuz. You would get what you want and it is cheaper!
I also have both but I’m considering to leave Tidal for Qobuz.
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Same. I’ve been building out Favorites a lot more in Qobuz than Tidal. And I use the offline music when I travel.
I had both. Left Tidal. Haven’t missed it.
Same for me.
Started with Tidal, got a Qobuz account to try it out and used both during a couple of months. Decided to go with Qobuz and used Soundiiz to convert all songs and playlists from Tidal over to Qobuz.
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Seeing as I started this thread way back when, thought I would pitch in with an update. Like most others I ditched Tidal a good while back and stayed with Qobuz. No regrets.
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i have both and both are equally good.
if you get your content and music and both, go for the one which has better price.
for example folks in the US might be knowing that there is a great offer from bestbuy for tidal, $99 for first year and 119 per year afterwards. which is far cheaper than both tidal and qobuzz current pricing.
With that pricing I am pretty certain you are not comparing like with like. That bestbuy offer must only relate to Tidal Premium which is a lossy service using AAC 320kbs. Tidal HiFi is the service comparable to Qobuz. I am pretty certain that bestbuy are not discounting $19.99 per month to $8.25 but discounting from $9.99 for the compressed version. Please check.
Comparing lossy streaming services would be Tidal Premium v. Spotify Premium and not involve Qobuz which no longer offers an MP3 ( or other lossy) service. However I would not see either of those options as all that desirable for a dCS based system as the latter is (or should be) about the highest refinement and resolution.
@PAR
the bestbuy offer is for tidal HiFi only and not tidal premium.
tidal premium is even lower at 79 dollars an year
Then that is one hell of a bargain.
yes sir it is
for me, member pricing on first year was 99 and 69 for hifi and premium. second year was 119/79
I also changed from Tidal to Qobuz as they seems to pay the artists better atleast according to this.
Right now my Qobuz account is less money than than my old Tidal so I cant complain about that.
| DIGITAL SERVICE PROVIDER | $ PER STREAM |
|---|---|
| Qobuz | $0.04390 |
| Peloton | $0.04036 |
| iHeartRadio | $0.01426 |
| Amazon Unlimited | $0.01175 |
| Napster/Rhapsody | $0.01110 |
| 24/7 Entertainment GmbH | $0.01050 |
| YouTube Red | $0.00948 |
| Tidal | $0.00927 |
| Deezer | $0.00567 |
| Google Play | $0.00543 |
| Apple | $0.00495 |
| KKBox | $0.00435 |
| Amazon Digital Services Inc. | $0.00395 |
| Spotify | $0.00331 |
| Loen | $0.00205 |
| Pandora | $0.00155 |
| Vevo | $0.00109 |
| Yandex LLC | $0.00051 |
| YouTube Content ID | $0.00028 |
| UMA | $0.00013 |
Peloton est presque en tête ! 
(Sorry it works only in french)
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As you say, according to that list. However the streaming services do not normally pay the artists at all. Imagine what a vast database they would need of up to date artists’ contact addresses to do this.
These sums are really based on what they pay the record labels. The record labels then pay the artists in accordance with their contracts or licences ( the latter where the artist owns the rights in the recording). The well publicised issue about what artists get from streaming is really about the share that the record label passes on. There are numerous aspects that relate to this as streaming is a new(ish) concept and may not be properly recognised in the contract or, at this point, even in the applicable jurisdiction’s copyright legislation.
It is also unclear if they are payments solely concerning the use of the rights in the sound recording or are a combination of payments that include use of the rights in the musical works as well. This also suggests that the figures provided (or otherwise calculated) by or for the services may not be strictly comparable.
Finally they are not fixed sums. They are the result of a calculation based upon the streaming service’s income, possibly less costs, divided by total number of streams. They are therefore dynamic as they will change by the number of paying subscribers, the subscription rate and usage. So these can only be snapshots and may also not be comparable in this aspect too as the streaming services will be unlikely to have identical accounting periods.
Without detailed information we shall probably never know the actual earnings of artists from any service.
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I am very well aware of that the services dont pay the artists directly and there might be very different ways for the record company to pay out the money from the different streaming services to the artist.
Still Qobuz does seem to pay more and I hope that the artists get some of that 
Although the base payment is lower if I was an artist I would much prefer to have my track streamed by Spotify than Qobuz even though the base payment figure for Spotify is so low per stream.
Let’s say that 25% of the service’s subscribers streamed my track. For Qobuz that is, say, 500,000 streams ( guesstimate based on their subscriber target before they added the USA service of 1m with a margin of 1m added for the USA). For Spotify if given the same level of interest from its subscribers there would be 36,000,000 streams ( based on last autumn’s actual subscriber figure of 144,000,000).
From Qobuz I would get a cheque for $964. From Spotify $119,160. Unsurprisingly I prefer the Spotify payment.
As I said it is dynamic. If there was a standard rate per stream, for example fixed by law, then the effect would be the closure of all of the smaller streaming services ( as they would have insufficient income to pay it) and hugely popular artists could potentially earn the annual GDP of a small country from a single album.
Well either way when you look deeper in to the payment it is not that easy.
How You Should Actually Think About Streaming Payouts
So, let’s take a step back and look at how the digital services actually calculate the artist’s total payout. Most of the streaming services, from Spotify and Apple to Google Play and Napster use what is referred to as “pro-rata” or “platform-centric” payout distribution model. Here’s how it works:
On the DSP side, services negotiate global payout rates with the content owners (mainly the major labels and Merlin, which represents a vast share of independent catalog). As we’ve argued in the Mechanics of Streaming, this rate is likely to fall in the range from 60% to 70% for every streaming service out there, but let’s use the 70% for the sake of simplicity. The negotiated rate is applied to all service’s revenues, and the result is the total sum that the DSP will pay out to right holders. It’s a revenue pool that will be split between all artists on the platform. To divvy up that pie between the artists, DSP will calculate a “share of content” — the number of the artist streams divided by all streams on the platform.
How are Streaming Payouts Actually Calculated?
Let’s use an example. Imagine a streaming service X has made $1000 in revenues in one month, with a 70% payout rate. Out of that 70%, 57% is the cut of the recording owners, and publishers claim the remaining 13% in performance and mechanical royalties.
Now, if there were a total of 1 million streams on the platforms over the period, and your music generated 100,000 streams out of that million, your total payout would make $57 = (1000 * 57% * 100,000/1,000,000). Your songwriter would get another $13.
This model is not without its flaws, and some professionals in the music business are calling for a shift to user-centric payouts — which is a topic we might explore in the future. For now, however, the payout that you get from any streaming service (except for YouTube video-streaming, and, as of late, Deezer’s user-centric payout) is a function of:
- Total DSP’s revenue pool
- Negotiated global payout as a percentage of that revenue
- Total number of streams on the platform
- The number of your streams on the platform
Not All Streams are Created Equal
However — and here is where things get interesting — there is no such thing as a global, all-in revenue/content pool. Instead, there are dozens of separate buckets: for every subscription tier, every local market and so on. All the different types of streams create distinct content pools, and that means one simple thing. Not all streams are equally valuable. You wouldn’t try to cross a river because it is 4 feet deep on average . Accordingly, you shouldn’t judge the artist’s earnings on the platform based on the average per-stream payout.
For any artist out there, the per-stream rate will be in constant flux — simply because there are hundreds of factors affecting the overall revenue. The payout rate depends on who, where and how much streams your music — which is precisely the reason for inconsistency between the quotes you can find around the web. With that in mind, let’s look at the data once again, and put some real-world context behind it.
Absolutely. Around the turn of the century and in another life I was responsible for devising the royalty tariffs in the UK for the streaming services predecessor, narrowcasting*. Attempting to resolve the conflicts that arose between rights owners and users desires/needs, an inadequate legislative framework, existing precedent, various types of funding strategy etc. was rather stressful to put it mildly.
- Narrowcasting was (is) where a single or group of radio style services have their format so tightly defined that the listener has a greater chance of finding their precise choice of music rather than the more generalised approach of a broadcaster. For ( an imaginary) example, a group of stations one only playing group based top 20 hits from 1963-65, one 1966-1968, one 1969 - 1971 etc.
Anyway thank you so much for the links in your posting. I will ensure I devote the time to read them thoroughly.
Not sure when this happened but when I checked this morning (Feb 11), the BestBuy deal for Tidal HiFi is even better. They have some sort of a “Hot Deal” where you get Tidal HiFi for $49.99 for a year if you bought that package with a Pop Smoke rap LP that they chose for an additional $32 (with taxes). Total cost was $81.97. The same auto renewal for $119 after a year applies.