What number did Qobuz actually put on the record?
In its 2025 results, released in June 2026, the French high-resolution service Qobuz said it pays rightsholders an average of 18.73 dollars per 1,000 streams, and that the figure was checked by an independent firm. That sounds dry until you remember no other streaming platform will tell you its number at all. Qobuz grew revenue 45.7 percent last year, in a paid-streaming market that grew 8.8 percent, and it did so while passing roughly 70 percent of revenue to rightsholders. It counts 1.2 million monthly listeners across 26 countries, with the United States now its biggest market, and an average revenue per user of 135.90 dollars against a market average of 20.74. "Since the acquisition in 2015, we have chosen a structured, coherent path forward: a differentiation strategy, disciplined execution, and fully committed teams," said deputy chief executive Georges Fornay.
Why does one figure sting for house and techno?
Because streaming has always been the part of an underground artist's income you do not count on. A track that does respectably on the big platforms might come back as the price of a coffee, which is why the scene's real money has long lived in downloads on Beatport and Bandcamp and in vinyl. So a platform standing up and saying, out loud and with a receipt, that it pays several times what the majors are estimated to pay, lands as both encouragement and provocation. The catch is scale. 1.2 million listeners is a rounding error next to Spotify's hundreds of millions, and a better rate on a small base still will not pay a producer's rent. The number is a flag planted, not a living earned.
Show me the rate, then we can argue about it. Right now most of the industry will not even show the rate.
So why will the big platforms not publish theirs?
Because a per-stream rate is not a fixed price. It is revenue divided by total plays, and it keeps falling as catalogues bloat with AI uploads and functional filler designed to farm royalties. Publishing an audited figure invites exactly the comparison Qobuz just forced, and none of the majors want to be measured against 18.73 dollars. Qobuz is making the opposite bet from the volume game: paid-only, ad-free, lossless audio, human-curated editorial, employees who are shareholders, and no debt. Whether that stays a boutique for audiophiles or scales into a real alternative is the open question. What it has already changed is the terms of the argument.
