Quobuz Receivership

From the Qobuz Blog (December 1, 2015)

Dear users,

You may have noticed this weekend that Qobuz had some rather serious accessibility problems on Saturday, November 28, as well as during the following night. This is because our servers crashed on the night of Friday to Saturday and were stubborn to restart.

 The service was operational again by the evening of Saturday, but on Sunday morning experienced another outage.
These things always happen at the wrong time – but as if by clockwork, usually on the eve of a busy weekend at month-end or a Saturday morning. We don’t consider the quality of your listening experience with us to be a laughing matter and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.

 We are a little fragile due to an ongoing migration from our old servers to the “cloud”, a solution that will bring fluidity to the service regardless of site traffic and give us the possibility of launching the service in new countries – yes, we are working for our future!
We thank our users for their confidence. This technical problems were very badly timed, but have nothing to do with our current situation, except that we did not wish to renew expensive servers a few weeks before migrating to a new infrastructure.
In the meantime, we have taken the necessary measures and we believe that your experience on Qobuz should be back to ‘business as usual’.

 Thank you again for your patience; and to our technicians and supporting management who have had to carry out this difficult project, we thank you too.

Interesting that they have moved from on-premise servers to a cloud offering while in 'administration'. Not sure if still spending money on updating their infrastructure tells us anything?

Kevo posted:

From the Qobuz Blog (December 1, 2015)

Dear users,...

Interesting that they have moved from on-premise servers to a cloud offering while in 'administration'. Not sure if still spending money on updating their infrastructure tells us anything?

I think it tells us that a cloud solution is cheaper than an in house server solution when transaction (data) volumes are variable and expanding !    Cloud services sales people have been telling potential customers this since the 1980's... but it's only now becoming an accepted technology as the capacity of networks expands and business owners are beginning to trust the internet's reliability.  

Nothing (at the moment) to do with music, but watch Microsoft does over the next few years with their Windows 10 customer base... today you're running Win10 on your computer;  in a few years you'll be running it on the Microsoft cloud computers... check back here in five years and see if I'm wrong  

This is interesting, as it indeed shows ongoing investment. I know from my own professional experience that this sort of migration activity (migrating to AWS) is involved and not cheap to execute, although the ongoing costs to expand will be reduced.

it also means we may see Tidal type streaming performance issues in the future.. Progress brings new challenges... AWS shared infrastructure and near realtime or low latency streaming / audio-over-IP services still need to evolve in my opinion.

Simon

I would hope these are good signs, I still think they are by far the best downloading and streaming service provider. I basically besides extreme exceptions giving them all of my business.

Some more positive news on Qobuz. 

On Monday, December 14, 2015, an audience was held at the Commercial Court of Paris, at which the each potential buyer presented their respective proposed takeover bids for Qobuz.

Two offers remain in contention, both of which present serious guarantees for the continuity of Qobuz’ activity in line with what makes the French online music service truly unique.

The court will make a decision with immediate effect on the 29th of December.

_{Source: http://blogsv2.qobuz.com/qobuz...wo-buyers-for-qobuz/}

That does sound quite hopeful.  In another article around a week ago Yves Riesel said that two of the four offers were 'insulting', and would take the operation down to just five employees, while the other two were very good offers and would leave the existing management in place.  He was hopeful the court would favour the same preferred offers, and the above would suggest that is so.  Very good.

I do like Riesel and his outspoken ways!  Good for him and good for the employees.

And good for us customers too, it seems! 

Bert Schurink posted:

I would hope these are good signs, I still think they are by far the best downloading and streaming service provider. I basically besides extreme exceptions giving them all of my business.

With all the music you buy, Bert, their future should be assured!

Latest post on the Qobuz Blog is excellent news:

Dear Sir, Dear Madam, 
Dear Subscriber,

The entire Qobuz team joins me in wishing you all the very best for the New Year ahead, in both music and beyond.

As you may know, the last two years have been particularly difficult for Qobuz. We failed to find the necessary sources to refinance the service, leading to a situation of ‘safeguard’ being declared in the summer of 2014, with administration then being declared in a court in November 2015. After these procedures, the Tribunal has heard a number of different offers in this time and has selected from among them that of Xandrie, who since the 29 December have taken the reigns at Qobuz.

Xandrie, a company which forms part of the Thébaud Group, presented a plan for Qobuz that is very respectful of our current approach, that is to say, very much in keeping with what our clients like about us. After many meetings with Xandrie, the anticipation and careful preparation shown by their leadership has been very encouraging for the Qobuz team, who will now look to closely adhere to the plans for the further development of our service.

We begin today a new chapter in the history of Qobuz. With the same team and indeed, the same project, but doubly fortified in nature, more ambitious than ever, with the backing of a group that has long been missing. Although the end of the story is certainly not that which Alexandre Leforestier and I had dreamed of, we believe that we can be proud of the huge progress made since 2008.

Our thanks also go to the huge numbers of you that had the patience to tolerate our shortcomings and encourage us to develop. Our gratitude also goes out to the representatives of Innovacom Investments and Sigma Management, who supported Qobuz to the end. Without them, Qobuz would not have existed: we will set out in 2016 to immediately prove they have not been wrong to support us, unlike those who did not want to follow their example.

To our users and subscribers who have continually stood behind the values upheld by Qobuz and have shown us incredible support – we hesitated to reach out to you sooner, as we wanted to focus on a positive message that would not see your confidence in us waver. In actual fact, our situation prompted an unbelievable response from you, one that helped us continually break turnover records for the past few months. We will never forget that, and dedicate our future success to your overwhelming solidarity.

What makes a service like ours so unique is the ability we have to support you daily. We are on call every day with the mission to animate the website and applications in a way that ensures you get the absolute most out of your passion for discovery, music, and of course, audio. Of course, should you so desire, our recommendations, editorial content and hand-crafted selections are always there for inspiration, but the most important of all is your ability to exercise your free will, and to be provided with the necessary tools to do so effectively. Independence is and will be always I hope the very nature of Qobuz.

As for myself, I will now take my leave from this wonderful team at Qobuz, without forgetting or losing sight of what we’ve achieved. I will be so proud to watch to the beautiful bricks of this project being laid over the next year or two, and only too happy to see those who never believed in us proven wrong.

Happy New Year!
Au Revoir!
Yves Riesel

Looking forward to continued excellent high quality streaming and Hi Res downloads.

A nice New Year present!

Further details from telecompaper.com:

French music streaming service Qobuz, currently in receivership, will be acquired by Xandrie, a platform for games and cultural content, Les Echos reported, citing the Paris commercial court. The news was also confirmed by Denis Thebaud, the CEO and majority shareholder of Xandrie, who said the deal will not include Qobuz debt. SonVideo also tried to buy the streaming service. No financial details were disclosed.

Xandrie expects its new acquisition to become profit making from 2019, after receiving a marketing investment boost and EUR 10 million to upgrade its technology. The idea is to better publicise the brand and develop the product, both for PCs and mobile phones, on a national as well as international scale. Germany and the UK will be the priority markets, at an initial stage.

Qobuz CEO Yves Riesel will remain during the transition period.

Now we need Naim integration and add additional countries like Czech Rep :-)

Great news - and indeed I hope the Naim integration will now happen.

Phew!  Let's hope the new owners don't mess it up.  Happy new year, Qobuzites.

Great news!  Also, I bought a load of tracks over the last couple of days.  There are other HD download services which offer better prices but I love Qobuz because I can (mostly) buy individual tracks when I want.

Which hires or cd-quality downlpad shops offer better prices? Sometimes https://bleep.com (electronic music and rarely pop) are a little bit cheaper. In most cases hdtracks.com is much more expensive. Do you know other shops? Naim is more exlenskve, too, or does not have the music, that I am looking for.

Gotta love Qobuz pricing. I was looking at the expanded version of everyone's favourite Fleetwood Mac album Tusk. £42.74 with country set to UK. Added to basket and it became 37.49€. I then decided to add a couple or other albums. 2 by Mac Demarco, £7.19 = 8.99€. Tell Me I'm Pretty by Cage The Elephant, £15.19 = 15.39€. 

PeterJ posted:

Great news!  Also, I bought a load of tracks over the last couple of days.  There are other HD download services which offer better prices but I love Qobuz because I can (mostly) buy individual tracks when I want.

They are the cheapest by far, let me know which service is structurally cheaper, especially when you have Qobuz sublime like me...

I have just bought a couple of albums from HIGHRESAUDIO.  Yellow Brick Road for £13 and all Todd Rundgen's 70's albums for £18.  They have a downloader app which is good.

So far although I'm sympathetic to Qobuz I haven't found their search facility to be user friendly, at least not for my purposes, and they haven't shown themselves to be effective at correcting errors in listing details. And with no interest whatsoever in their streaming service the sublime subscription is irrelevant, so the cost is not that competitive with the few things I've found of interest. I'm just hoping that under new ownership they might improve the search engine and maybe reduce prices for high res. Meanwhile Highresaudio is easier to use, and has a good range of classical at sometimes reasonable prices for high res. I have found, though, that different currency prices don't always reflect actual exchange rates, and it can be beneficial to buy in euros or dollars instead of £.

Yes, the search in qobuz is sub optimal. It should list albums and singles separately.

But at the moment the site seems broken anyway. It indeed is french only and also my login does not work anymore. I hope they will be back for germany soon.

Innocent Bystander posted:

So far although I'm sympathetic to Qobuz I haven't found their search facility to be user friendly, at least not for my purposes, and they haven't shown themselves to be effective at correcting errors in listing details. And with no interest whatsoever in their streaming service the sublime subscription is irrelevant, so the cost is not that competitive with the few things I've found of interest. I'm just hoping that under new ownership they might improve the search engine and maybe reduce prices for high res. Meanwhile Highresaudio is easier to use, and has a good range of classical at sometimes reasonable prices for high res. I have found, though, that different currency prices don't always reflect actual exchange rates, and it can be beneficial to buy in euros or dollars instead of £.

You should try Pono's search engine. Worst ever.

Missing catalogs. As a result of the Xandrie acquisition a number of catalogs have been withdrawn from Qobuz. In response the company is exploring ways to compensate customers until the matter can be resolved.

As I understand it a number of labels are somewhat put out that Xandrie didn't take over Qobuz's liabilities, meaning they are still out of pocket, following Qobuz's financial issues. Streaming contracts are structured so that they can not be automatically transferred after a significant change of ownership. As a result the disgruntled labels are seeking larger than normal upfront payments in order to continue availability.

Personally I'm somewhat conflicted by this. Labels have such onerous terms as to make it near impossible for streaming services to be viable, but I also accept that Qobuz/Xandrie must pay its bills.

In related and somewhat depressing news, Ars Technica have put Tidal on its 'Deathwatch 2016' list. The argument is that the cash burn rate is inconsistent with subscriber growth, leading to an inevitable crunch point.

That's most concerning (the Qobuz bit). Perhaps enough to keep me with Tidal pro tem. Where is all this heading - Apple finally launching a comprehensive high res streaming solution and mopping up the market? I'm beginning to wish for it.

There seems to be contradiction and confusion about what "HiRes" actually is, no doubt encouraged by the suppliers who would love their standard and LoRes offerings to be rechristened "HiRes". Is the Apple product likely to be higher than 16/44? If no, it's not HiRes no matter what Apple call it.

Hi res is a relative term. When, the 1930s, the BBC started broadcasting TV, AD Blumlein developed the so called Hi res TV system that the BBC used. And they continued to use it into the 1970s when 405 line VHF TV broadcasts stopped in favour of 625 line system that also incorporated colour broadcasting on the UHF band. In the 1930s the 405 line system was Hi res compared to the Logie Baird TV system!

If Apple call CD standard recording, “Hi res", this is true as far as it compares to MP3s of any standard.

I am not defending the calling of CD standard as Hi res, but just noting that strictly the real name might more accurately be called Higher res!

ATB from George