The digital counterpart to the analog record store, where music lovers exchange ideas, consciously take time to browse and only too willingly spend more money than the monthly 9.99 euros for a subscription to Spotify & Co: The appeal of this marketing strategy lies in the French music service Qobuz hand, because vinyl has been enjoying growing popularity for years.

In the USA, the largest music market in the world, sales of records in 2020 exceeded that of comparatively cheaper CDs for the first time in more than 30 years.

Benjamin Fischer

Editor in business.

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    In Germany, too, things are looking up, although the CD still has a big lead here.

    This upswing is of course taking place in a niche: 5.5 percent of the total turnover of 1.79 billion euros was made up of vinyl sales on the German market for music recordings.

    The big growth driver is and will remain streaming, where Qobuz, as a purely fee-based provider of lossless audio quality - i.e. not compressed for smaller amounts of data - also moves in a niche.

    “We don't think in terms of Spotify, Apple or Amazon Music,” says Georges Fornay, the French's deputy managing director, which is why we only talk about numbers to a limited extent.

    While market leader Spotify reported 158 million subscribers at the end of the first quarter of this year, the last information from Qobuz comes from April 2019. Almost 200,000 subscribers were then called the US industry site Variety.

    Not least due to the recent expansion into 6 new markets - Australia, New Zealand and the four Scandinavian countries - there should now be a few more to 18.

    "Is a group of people who not only value the best possible sound quality"

    According to Qobuz, the number of users grew by 33 percent from 2019 to 2020. The service's footprint on the streaming market is still likely to be significantly smaller than the vinyl market share on the German market for music recordings. The fact that the worst Spotify competitors Apple and Amazon Music are now offering HiFi quality and more for the standard streaming price of 9.99 euros doesn't make life easier for small premium services like Qobuz or Tidal. The streaming business is tough anyway - if only because the various services usually have to cede around two thirds to 70 percent of their entire income to the rights holders of the music. Qobuz was about to end in 2015, but was ultimately taken over by the entertainment company Xandrie,whose boss Denis Thébaud has also acted as managing director since then. In September 2020, Qobuz last received 10 million euros in fresh capital - from a holding company Thébauds, among others.