MQA Ltd., in the United Kingdom, is placed in receivership. MQA is at the origin of the so-called “Master Quality Authenticated” technology, an encoding used in the world of on-demand listening which notably distinguishes the offer of Tidal, the service created by rapper Jay Z, then opposed to Spotify on artist compensation and sound quality.
The figures published Tuesday by the media Music Business Worldwide on MQA Ltd. are abysmal and without appeal: 1.1 million Canadian dollars in revenue in 2021 for 7.5 million in expenses! And the data for 2020 is equivalent. Dropped by its main shareholder, MQA is not viable.
The technology launched in 2015 was mainly implemented between 2017 and 2019 following the signing of licensing agreements with three key players: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and the on-demand listening platform Tidal. The former agreed to encode their recordings in MQA and Tidal sold “high-fidelity” subscriptions giving access to the documents thus processed. MQA’s income was provided by the royalties linked to the licenses to use the process, an encoding, or “codec”, mysterious and paying.
An illusion
Today, the MQA has become the “Betamax of the streaming », except that the Betamax was very good. MQA’s stroke of genius was above all the name “Master Quality Authenticated” which understood and integrated that, with the “mass market” being lost to Spotify, a distributor of compressed music, the digital universe associated with the keyword “Master opened up to a certain clientele the fantasy of accessing the sonic purity of the recording as it was conceived.
For many consumers, the CD remains associated with a tension in the sound message, hence the return, on the one hand, to an alleged “purity of vinyl” and, on the other hand, the attraction for a streaming High quality.
In its communication, MQA claims to “fold Master-quality sound like origami”; a perfect mirror to the larks according to Yves Riesel, founder of Qobuz, in his professional letter couacs.info: “MQA, in reality, did indeed compress the music, even if it was less so than the MP3 format; and backed by a very scholarly presentation of their technical process, MQA went to great lengths to demonstrate that their compression was the equivalent of HiRes, their line of sight. »
This lucid analysis explains why, in the face of facts and listening, with MQA, we often felt very far from a “Master” or “high definition (HD)”. Here too, Yves Riesel goes there with a lucid reflection: “MQA raised another fundamental question: that of the opportunity and legitimacy that we have, record companies heirs to the work of our predecessors, and music platforms online, tampering with original masters. »
Clarification
In fact, the disappearance of this format will simplify and clarify things. There are now MP3 and ALAC (Apple) compression, the CD standard (16 bits-44.1 kHz) and HD, or “Master”, i.e. 24 bits-96 kHz, or even 24-192 or DSD (Direct Stream Digital).
The lossless file size reduction commonly adopted by all is now the free FLAC encoding (Free Lossless Audio Codec), not subject to royalties, which applies to both 16-bit-44.1 kHz and the higher resolutions 24-48, 24-96 and 24-192.
The marketing and sound arguments put forward by MQA have enabled Tidal to become an on-demand listening service with “sound added value” automatically integrated, in the same way as Qobuz, on many high-fidelity devices. For its part, Apple only has a partnership with Sonos.
It is now becoming an urgent challenge for Presto Music’s new service, launched in March 2023, which offers “true HD” 24-96 and 24-192 broadcasting, to take at least an equivalent place. Tidal is strongly affected, since its “HiFi Plus” subscription, sold monthly for $10 more expensive than the basic subscription, is based on a technology that has certainly been questioned and increasingly contested over the past two years, but now downright obsolete and without a future.
As for MQA Ltd., the company had just announced a new technology, the SCL6, intended for wireless transmission in Bluetooth, wifi and UWB (Ultra Wide Band). Will it reappear elsewhere or in another form?