I love Qobuz’s hi res albums and will be keeping it along with Tidal, but I guess I had expected the older albums of fill out more by now.
Case example today.
Charnett Moffett, a jazz bassist I looked for today.
Tidal has six albums listed: Qobuz none!
With various artists one of six
Appearances 26 of 42.
Hopefully this will improve with more time???
It may be because of being in beta, it may be because of licensing issues, but here in the Netherlands the situation seems a bit brighter:
Reports in other places indicate that by 3rd quarter 2019 the USA catalog should be mostly complete.
THanks Geoff
Your screenshot holds a lot of hope!
Tried Qobuz for two months in Europe (no USA catalog). I would prefer Qobuz above Tidal because it’s an European service. However, I tried to find my Tidal favorites in Qobuz but 23% is not available…
Must agree. Lots of stuff is missing from Qobuz, but hoping once the US beta concludes, more albums will become available.
I feel like Qobuz really blew their launch. There was a lot of momentum going into it. I was eager to move to it and away from Tidal. They had years to prepare and an existing EU service but the delays, the closed beta, the open beta with what is clearly an unfinished product…and the fact they are charging full price for what is clearly an unfinished test product to “beta” customers is unforgivable. They have no music discovery (at all!) Their playlists/curation they promote is mostly missing. The same playlists are duplicated across categories, some are broken (I reported some of that to them early on, they later confirmed they’re aware of it, and almost 3 months later they’re still broken!) and the catalog is still thin though early in the public beta they assured “we’re ingesting thousands of tracks every day!” Their solution to lack of discovery was to get Roon…which may have sold me on Roon (doing the trial now), but still hasn’t sold me on Qobuz.
I had cancelled Tidal as soon as I got in on the beta, tried it for a few months, then ran screaming back to Tidal. IMO, the best sales pitch for Tidal is to try Qobuz for a month. If Tidal doesn’t look amazing after that, nothing will.
I did renew my Qobuz for one month while I try Roon to use both together…but unfortunately while I like some of their playlists, there aren’t many of them, and everything I find in their playlists not only also exists on Tidal also, but the same artist has more albums on Tidal. Which is fairly condemning considering Tidal itself has a painfully lean back catalogue depth when compared with Deezer, and certainly against Spotify or Apple. With Roon Radio, plus Tidal’s radio, I feel like I could discover a lot more through Tidal than through Qobuz.
They have potential, but the botched beta leaves a very poor first impression that’s hard to overcome. I hope they can really wow me whenever (if ever?) they finalize the US beta and get an actual, complete catalog.
