UndergroundGoblinQobuz cracks down on AI-generated tracks, advocating for human music creation and curation
Classy Hatter
Why We’re Taking a Human‑First Stand on AI‑Generated Music — Qobuz Community
Artificial intelligence is transforming the music industry at an unprecedented pace. Faced with the explosion of AI-generated content and the legitimate questions it raises, Qobuz has chosen transparency. This charter establishes our framework: how we use AI, where we draw our lines, and what commi
durinnThis did not work out. They don’t seem to allow certain e-mail alias providers and VPNs. While it’s sort of understandable that they want to stop block scraping, fake accounts and other ill willed actors, it’s also detrimental to user privacy. Or rather, it’s hampering to user that otherwise already live a privacy oriented digital life. I’m staying with Tidal for now. 🙏
CreatHonestly the importing of all my playlists went perfectly well using Soundiiz. 15 years of playlists over with minimal loss in less than an hour.
Oh the impot itself went fine and quickly. But I have like 400+ playlists or something, so not being able to use folders isn’t an option. Cause that’s just inexcusable in 2026 to have a service where you can’t even nest or sort playlists. That was absolutely wild to me, and a hurdle I didn’t expect was even possible.
Additionally, when checking for which songs it failed to import, of which there was a surprising number, quite a few of my favorites were missing. And it’s not like it just didn’t correctly map them, they weren’t available at all. Generally like 15-20% of songs were missing. And that’s just waaay too much to accept for me.
I tried Qobuz for a while purely because of their anti AI stance, but the player just didn’t work very well on Linux. I’m stuck using Spotify for now but hopefully somebody else puts some effort into a Linux player
Did you try qbz? github.com/vicrodh/qbz. It works quite well, except Qobuz Connect (ability to control other Qobuz players) doesn’t work, and seems like it will never work.
Also, the Qobuz Windows app works quite well with Wine, but requires some tinkering. appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version…
I can’t remember exactly, it was months ago. I tried a couple things that straight up didn’t work for me (Debian Trixie). Ended up with Strawberry player and that worked but I just vastly preferred the functionality of Spotify. I’ll probably have another attempt next time I get AI tracks recommended to me
Qobuz with Strawberry is… not very good. I think qbz was released this year, so you probably didn’t try that. There’s a .deb file in GitHub for it, and it also comes in other forms, like Flatpak and AppImage.
What didn’t work well for you with the Qobuz player for Linux?
Note that Qobuz also has a store for drm free music. It‘s not just a streaming service.
DRM free high resolution lossless music, to be more specific. Their prices are quite high, though. Some normal album might cost 20€, while you can get the same album in same resolution for 10€ in Bandcamp (a US company, unfortunately).
As a side note, next week’s Friday (March 6th) is Bandcamp Friday, which means 100% of money you spend there goes to the bands and publishers. Bandcamp won’t take anything for themselves. daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays
I’m very happy with Qobuz. Switched over last year after 15 years of Spotify. The price is a little higher but it has more High quality recordings. Plus they give more money to artists per stream, and actively try to work against AI slop.
The biggest downside is that they don’t let you choose your language. (That they think everyone on Belgium speaks French is even worse since most people in Belgium actually speak Dutch)
I had the language problem too because I bought my subscription with an active VPN. So my preconfigured language was french. Just open a support Ticket. They will change it.
I really wanted to like Qobuz, and the migration of my music over from youtube music went very smoothly, but the app (on android at least) was incredibly buggy. simple things like shuffling play made the UI freak out and random parts start flashing and jittering, and it crashed multiple times a day.
I really hope they make it better but I switched back, and was honestly pretty shocked a company of that size put out a product like that, bugs happen but it was ridiculous.
Not disputing it’s buggy for you. It’s not buggy for me though. Using it on my android phone, AAOS in the car, android TV, and two windows machines.
The only thing not working properly for me is the Yamaha Musicast implementation, and ofcourse their stupid refusal to let me choose my own language for the app.
I wonder when or if people will ever realize that the best way to fight back against these de-personalizing, garbage-generating systems is to stop striving for a massive scale for everything – even when it doesn’t make any sense at all like for friend networks – and return to the basics of smaller-scale, trust-based systems.