Where does music come from that streams?


If I was creating my own streaming company, would I reproduce songs from a CD or from a record? So when I listen to my streaming source, qobuz, where do they get the music I listen to? Does the music come from master tapes? Well that would seem to be a pretty good place to get it

Sometimes I wonder, a particular song on qobuz doesn’t sound very good and I know I’ve heard it better in the past. And most stuff sounds pretty good and comparable to other sources.

 

 

emergingsoul

Is this a question about sourcing of the particular master or the way that streaming is licensed? Traditionally, the label (master side) did the deals and cleared the publishing rights (standard, compulsory rates on the publishing side). The Music Modernization Act paved the way for simplified licensing but that has nothing to do with source material, per se. 

I've had a Qobuz license just to experiment with-- the biggest shortcoming to me was that the repertoire was largely popular stuff, but not "deep"--and having some familiarity with different masterings of the same track, or different recordings of it, I found the catalog to be rather shallow in the area of post-bop jazz. Granted, a lot of stuff is on some of the better platforms and may satisfy the needs of a lot of listeners. But for me, streaming hasn't scratched my itch for "deep catalog" stuff. I also wonder to what extent some of the higher rez stuff is simply uprezzed. 

I get why people like streaming. And see the value in it for a lot of users. It's just not what I'm after. 

According to David Solomon of Qobuz, its files are delivered directly from the record companies. Who is your source.

I would imagine the record labels send audio files to Qobuz via FTP or other electronic means.

You can’t just take a cd or lp, digitize it, put it on a server and start charging people to stream it. You have to have a contract with the record company that owns the rights to the music, and they will send you a digital file, as cleeds said above, and whatever other information the deal calls for,

So many versions exist on qobuz of the same album.  Frankly I don't know what the record companies sent over.

I don't care about the licensing.  Tidal crops the top on the bottom of the frequency ranges to do their stupid Mqa crap. Sucks.

I wish qobuz did a better job of updating their material with roon. So many times I search on roon it's not there and then I search on qobuz and find it. Why is that?

 

As stated above, Qobuz gets its files directly from the record companies that control the content. Qobuz never gets within a country mile of a master tape - they just take whatever digital files are given to them. There is good evidence that some of their files are actually MP3 quality that has been put in FLAC format (you can test the bit rate in Audirvana and other computer music programs). This is not Qobuz' fault. They came that way from the record company.

I have never seen information about how the record companies come up with the digital files they submit to Qobuz. As far as I know, this part of the process is a black box. I would think that they would generally use the WAV file from the latest version of each title but who knows?

FWIW, I have compared several CDs to their Qobuz counterparts, being careful to use the same version, and they have all sounded identical to me.