Qobuz hits 1.2 million users with anti-AI pledge and human curation

Qobuz, the independently-owned, music-exclusive hi-res streaming and download service, has crossed 1.2 million monthly active users and now sits as the second fastest-growing music and media app in the US for 2025, per SimilarWeb’s Digital 100 report. The platform also ranked third in the UK. Qobuz confirmed the MAU number and a sharp spike in paid subscribers to Digital Music News on May 26, 2026. The growth runs against the wider streaming trend, and Qobuz is staking the next phase on a hard anti-AI position.

The pledge is the product

CEO Dan Mackta is explicit. Qobuz will not generate audio content, will not replace human curation with AI, and will not use customer data to train external AI models. AI-generated uploads get tagged and either kept out of editorial recommendations or removed outright, mirroring what Deezer’s detection tool already does at higher volume. Playlists and Albums of the Week are picked by human editors. As Mackta put it: “It’s almost so quaint; ‘Wow, humans picking music.’ Well, it turns out a lot of people love that.”

Audiophiles, K-pop fans, Rough Trade

The brand surprise inside the growth number is who is showing up. Qobuz expected audiophiles. The 2025 surge brought Chelsea Handler, Christina Hendricks, and a wave of BTS fans buying lossless and hi-res downloads at scale. K-pop superfans are now driving the same retro-tech buying pattern that pushed Stationhead activity. Qobuz is also pairing the digital service with physical retail. The platform launched a tech integration with Rough Trade to add a digital layer to in-store sales, exactly the kind of partnership that maps to the indie 1,000-true-fans economy.

What it means for working artists

If you release lossless masters, Qobuz is now one of the few platforms where audio fidelity is a marketing argument and not just a setting. The Hi-Res download store is a direct sale, not a fractional-cent stream, and the K-pop wave shows fan communities will actually buy. If you also care about the AI-slop signal-to-noise problem, the editorial-curation pledge is a different kind of distribution opportunity. Pitch the human editors. Spotify still has no AI music filter, and listeners increasingly notice the gap. Qobuz is betting that the gap is the moat for the next 12 months.

The take

Qobuz is the first streaming platform where the anti-AI position is a growth strategy, not a press release. 1.2 million MAUs is small next to Spotify, but the per-user economics on a $13 to $22 hi-res tier with download sales attached are a different unit altogether. If you make music for listeners who care how it sounds, this platform is back on the release-day checklist.