Qobuz Grew 45.7% While AI 'Slop' Flooded Streaming Rivals

Qobuz grew revenue 45.7% in 2025 — more than five times the overall streaming market's 8.8% — while AI-generated audio flooded its competitors. The French streamer now counts 1.2 million monthly active users, and its managing director thinks he knows exactly why listeners are switching.

Dan Mackta, Managing Director at Qobuz, refuses to call the tens of thousands of AI-created songs hitting music platforms daily "AI music." He has a sharper term.

"I'll call it music-esque content," Mackta says. "Music goes straight to people's emotions. It's not something to fool around with."

Deezer recently disclosed it receives 90,000 AI-generated songs per day. Mackta hasn't calculated Qobuz's exact figure, but he knows it's a lot. "Who asked for this? It's all just fraud," he says. "It's a shame that we have to put so much energy and resources into combating it. But of course we do. We have to. It's an industry-wide problem."

What does the flood of AI content change for Qobuz?

It has become a tailwind. Growth spikes can stem from brand awareness, endorsements, and viral moments — and Qobuz has benefited from all three. Its viral moment came when Spotify ran ICE ads, triggering a land rush toward Qobuz. Since AI slop started flooding platforms, the company's numbers have surged.

The streamer has backed that positioning with hard enforcement:

• It removed roughly four million AI-generated tracks from its internal search tool because they had no listening activity.
• It excluded about 60% of streams on AI tracks from royalty payouts due to fraud.
• In September, it rolled out a tag identifying tracks as AI-generated.

Human curation anchors the product. Qobuz's global team meets weekly to discuss favorite new music — whether from a label or a friend's recommendation — then selects releases for the app overall and for individual regions such as the US, UK, Australia, and Japan. It operates in 26 countries total. The new-releases slider, Album of the Week, and mood playlists like Summer Reggae are all handpicked.

Qobuz does this with 120 full-time employees. Spotify has over 7,000. "The biggest companies that have ever existed are our competitors," Mackta says. "It would be nice to be able to introduce new features in our apps faster, but we don't. Instead, we try to be the best online music store with a built-in fanzine that we can be."

The company isn't AI-free internally. Under its published AI charter, engineers used AI tools to speed back-end work on the recent new UI launch — but no AI touched graphic design or anything creative. "We can't be saying one thing about music and another thing about photography. It's not consistent," Mackta says.

Does quality actually win listeners?

Qobuz's track record gives it credibility. Founded in 2008 as a digital music store, it was first to offer CD-quality lossless (16-bit FLAC) downloads. It launched streaming in 2014 with lossless playback — a full 11 years ahead of Spotify's global lossless launch — and its lossless streaming remains slightly higher quality than Spotify's today.

Artists are responding. Yasiin Bey, the rapper formerly known as Mos Def, who once called the streaming revenue model "gross," made his 2009 album The Ecstatic exclusively available on Qobuz. "It's not so crazy to think that starting from a position of respecting the art and the artist actually resonates with people, but it's as simple as that," Mackta explains.

Music journalist Emma Wilkes chose Qobuz as the first streaming service she's ever paid for. She previously used Spotify's free tier and bought music on iTunes. "When you try and listen to Napalm Death on Spotify, you see how bad Spotify sound quality is," Wilkes says. "I don't think Spotify is doing enough about AI. That's genuinely really damaging to music. I very much appreciate that Qobuz values human curation as much as it does. It's about creating and supporting an ecosystem."

Can Qobuz dent Spotify's dominance?

Not according to Tatiana Cirisano, Vice President of Music Strategy at MIDiA. She doesn't foresee a mass exodus that will drastically affect Spotify's 761 million monthly active users. "The vast majority of people will choose convenience regardless of their personal attitudes or values," Cirisano says. "People might say, 'I don't want to listen to AI-generated music,' but they may end up listening to it anyway and not notice or care."

The economics still pinch. AI tracks compete with human artists for a royalty pool that isn't growing as fast as the catalog. "Not only were a lot of these AI-generated tracks made using tools that were trained on human catalogs without permission, but that music is now competing for the same listeners," Cirisano says. "The pot of money that can be paid out to each song and each artist isn't growing as fast as the number of mouths to feed."

Her advice to streamers, though, sounds a lot like Qobuz's existing playbook: "If we were in a place where people listened to artists and not just songs, where there was context about the artist presented alongside the song, I don't know that AI-generated music would be disrupting the market in the way that it is."