Qobuz, a streaming music service from France that competes with Tidal, Apple Music, and Amazon Music with its library of CD-quality and lossless hi-res audio tracks, now offers a student plan at a 60% savings over the company’s standard individual plan.
Qobuz calls it Studio Student and if you’re between 18 and 25 years old, and enrolled at a recognized school, you can subscribe for $5 per month, for up to two years. The plan provides the same access to Qobuz’s 100 million-plus titles as a normal subscription. There’s no minimum term and each plan starts with a one-month free trial period, letting you cancel within 30 days if you don’t like it.
The plan is available in every market where Qobuz is available and the company says that it uses a third-party service to verify student status. The other condition is that you’ll need to use the Qobuz website to sign up — the plan isn’t available via the Qobuz app.
Once you’re signed up, your student price will remain in effect for 12 months. At the end of that period, providing you’re still an enrolled student, you can extend for another 12 months at the same price.
After 24 months, the Studio Student plan will automatically switch to the regular Studio Solo subscription, and you’ll be billed the standard monthly rate for that plan (which is currently $13 per month or $130 per year).
As with all Qobuz plans, the Studio Student subscription includes:
- Access to Qobuz Magazine, with news, interviews, op-eds, retrospectives, and hi-fi listening tutorials and guides
- Importing of playlists from other platforms using Soundiiz
- Handpicked, human-curated featured releases and playlists
- Offline listening
Since Qobuz’s main benefit is its high-quality collection of lossless music, you may want to look at your options for lossless listening. Very few wireless earbuds or wireless headphones let you listen losslessly, so folks often invest in an affordable digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and pair it with a decent set of wired headphones.
Alternatively, if your headphones support listening via USB-C audio (like the Beats Studio Pro), you can connect your cans directly to an Android phone, computer, or an iPhone 15 or later handset, and you’ll get similar results.