Qobuz catalog very limited for Alternative / Independent / Punk / Hardcore

I ended canceling Qobuz for now. I saw some article that made it sound like their limited library was on purpose since they are targeting the audiophile market. But I don’t think that should limit it to just Jazz and Classical. I was excited when they added the Beggers Banquet catalog and a lot of it said it was hires but ended up only to be streamed at CD quality.

The hires sound quality of Qobuz did sound better in my system but in the end wasn’t willing to lose over 20% of my library for it. If they finally close the gap some months from now, I’ll be back.

It’s out of beta and I have not seen much expansion of the library. Still a lot of missing albums when compared to Tidal. I realize in the USA Tidal had a multi-year head start but do we have your assurance that the Qobuz library is expanding?

I paid for a year and figure I will give it a year but if I don’t see improvement then it’s back to Tidal for me (even though I’m not fond of MQA at all).

Seriously - the deeper I dig the more stuff I find missing. Subcultures, be it Punk, Oi & Streetpunk, Ska, Dub, or even Alternative (also some Singer/Songwriter) is seriously missing and I’ve done my manual search… kinda just confirms my thoughts on the clientele Q is aiming at… not for people into Subculture and more for pure audiophile and mainstream

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What’s weird is they have some older stuff but not new stuff for artists like Deadmau5, Morphology, The Crystal Method and many many more. I’m not sure why they would have older albums but not the current or newer ones by the same artists.

I re-subscribed to Tidal and will have both services for a while but in a year (I paid Qobuz for a year), if Qobuz’s library has not improved, I will probably have to drop them.

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Is it possible the newer albums are on different records label. Believe all their uploads are record label based

I was expecting to find a lot of new albums everyday but then just tried on Friday’s when new albums were added and found hardly anything else added over the last few weeks.

Now I’m back to Tidal using MQA, which really isn’t as bad as some make it out to be. I’ll be checking these forums to see if anything changes throughout the year. Prefer to use Qobuz.

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For about a month, I tested different streaming services and took note every time I searched for an album. So now I have a fairly representative of the rate of success I might have from each service.

The result may be different for other listeners and they might have been different for me another month, but I thought some of you might find these numbers interesting.

  • Amazon Music: found 85% of my album searches
  • Spotify: found 84% of my album searches
  • Apple Music: found 83% of my album searches
  • Deezer: found 81% of my album searches
  • Tidal: found 81% of my album searches
  • YouTube Music: found 81% of my album searches as official releases, but it goes up to 92% counting unofficial uploads
  • Napster: found 79% of my album searches
  • Pandora: found 78% of my album searches
  • Qobuz: found 74% of my album searches

By the way, in case anyone wants to read more, I went through this trouble as I was writing a this article on choosing a streaming service.

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Great job. What genres?

Leaning towards symphonic and prog rock, but a few others outside those boxes too.

@Jan_Willem Here’s the whole list in case you are curious.

Strange.
I seriously ask myself, what you and some others experience.
Most entries here state that something is missing on Qobuz. Alas almost all statements are not giving concrete examples.
You do.
In your article you say

"Amazon was of course the only service where I found Garth Brooks’ albums, but also the only one with Don Shirley’s “Orpheus in the Underworld”. It also beat Tidal in finding Asia’s self-titled album, The Entrance Band’s self-titled album from 2009… "

I have just taken a look in the Qobuz app:

3 albums of The Entrance Band including self titled twice
51 albums of Asia including Asia
83 albums of Don Shirley including Orpheus

Only Garth Brooks is barely represented…

I have re-checked Qobuz from the US and:

  • Only 1 album from The Entrance Band titled “Face the Sun”
  • I never said Asia’s “Asia” is not on Qobuz. I said it’s not on Tidal. By the way, all those Asia releases that you see are a mix of different Asias that have nothing to do with each other.
  • I still don’t see Don Shirley’s “Orpheus in the underworld”

The only mismatch seems to be Orpheus. @Zi_Karus. What country are you in?

Harmonium is available on tidal but with the title « les cinq saisons »
All king crimson albums are now available.

I have an Irish Qobuz account. Three versions of Don Shirley’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” here.

I can see a lot of “Asia” as well, but I am not familiar enough to see if they are unrelated “Asias”

Not much Garth Brooks for sure, strange. But I see plenty of other mainstream Country and Alt-Country for that matter. I don’t have a Tidal account so it’s just a guess really. A lot more French language Alternative / Independent / Punk / Hard Core I would imagine on Qobuz compared with Tidal. These are not genres I have had much exposure to but one of the unexpected joys of a Qobuz account I have found.

I guess were are differences per country. I know this happens in other services too.

As per Garth Brooks, he has an exclusive with Amazon, so for the moment anything you find elsewhere will just be tributes.

We are probably talking about a country difference here too, because I’ve looked thoroughly again and I still don’t find Les Cinq Saisons on Tidal.

Most Crimson albums became available in 2019 on all streaming services. In the 4 releases I tested, I found the three albums I searched for both on Tidal and Qobuz, but didn’t find the EP VROOOM. Pretty good in any case.

I subscribed to Tidal for 2 years, then added Qobuz for a month trial last Summer and found the US catalog lacking but it sounded better to me than Tidal CD. I did not continue after the trial.

6 months later when Qubuz dropped the US price, I again added it and dumped Tidal after a couple weeks. Yep, the catalog is still smaller but you know there are still millions of songs I’ve never heard so…I’m enjoying some fraction of them.

@Manu
I am in Germany but use a french account.
(Orpheus is available as CD and high-res version btw.)

In my experience comparing Qobuz and Tidal the latter is better concerning Hip-Hop and Electronic. But I have seldomly missed Indie or Jazz music on Qobuz. At least relevant stuff. Classicalwise Qobuz is better by a mile anyways… That is why I wonder about the commentaries here which mostly cannot be checked without examples.

Got it. The impression I get is that Qobuz is better than Tidal for jazz and classical, but the examples that I checked lean more towards rock, so I would not be able to say it with much confidence. Maybe someone who is more into those genres could also check and document their searches to share with the community.

For the USA, Tidal has a multi-year head start whereas Qobuz just launched in the USA about 2 years ago. I’ve heard through the grapevine however that Qobuz still indeed falls quite behind in terms of number of available tracks. Tidal is something like 50 million and Qobuz 30 million.

Their declared catalogs are 60 million songs on Tidal, 50 million on Qobuz.