Spotify vs Qobuz
Streaming Royalties Comparison 2026
Earnings comparison by stream count
Streams needed to earn $1,000
The Biggest Rate Gap on the Site
Spotify and Qobuz sit at opposite ends of the per-stream table. Spotify's modelled average is $0.004; Qobuz's published figure is $0.01873, roughly 4.7 times more. It is the widest gap between any two platforms we track, and it is worth being clear about what the two numbers are before drawing a conclusion from it.
The Spotify figure is an average of what artists and distributors report reaching them. The Qobuz figure is what Qobuz says it paid to rights holders, labels and publishers included, for its fiscal year to March 2024. It is a gross number that includes the publishing side, so an artist's share of it is smaller. The two are not measured at the same point in the chain. Even so, the direction is not in doubt: Qobuz pays several times more per play.
The reason is the same one that separates Tidal from Spotify, only more so. Spotify has a free, ad-supported tier that generates a small fraction of the revenue per listener that a subscription does, and its subscribers stream a lot. Qobuz has no free tier, charges more than most services, and its listeners play fewer tracks. Divide a smaller pool by far fewer streams and the per-stream figure climbs.
Why Spotify Still Pays Most Artists More
A rate is only half of a payout; the other half is the stream count, and there Spotify is in a different league. It has hundreds of millions of listeners across nearly every country. Qobuz has a small, audiophile audience concentrated in France, Western Europe and the United States. For a typical independent catalogue, Qobuz plays are a fraction of a percent of Spotify plays.
Put the two together and the arithmetic goes Spotify's way almost every time. An artist with 100,000 Spotify streams a month grosses about $400. To match that on Qobuz at the published rate takes about 21,400 streams, and very few independent artists see anything close to that there. The Qobuz calculator and the Spotify calculator will show the exact figures for your own counts.
The exception is the artist whose music suits Qobuz's audience: classical, jazz, acoustic and well-recorded music in general, where the Qobuz share of plays can be many times the average. For them the high rate on a meaningful stream count is real money. For everyone else, the Qobuz line on a statement is a pleasant surprise rather than a plan, and the useful lesson from the comparison is that the platform with the highest rate and the platform that pays you the most are almost never the same one.
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