Qobuz Signs an International Partnership With Warp Records

Qobuz has announced an international partnership with Warp Records, the independent British electronic label founded in 1989. It is not a licensing or exclusivity arrangement — Warp's catalogue was already on the service — but a promotional and editorial campaign that will run across the Qobuz app, its magazine, its download store and its marketing channels over the coming months.

The deal continues a pattern Qobuz has been building for a while: a hi-res streaming and download service aligning itself with labels whose identity is as strong as their catalogue. Warp joins Blue Note, Deutsche Grammophon and ECM Records on the list of imprints Qobuz has given this treatment, which is a telling spread — jazz, classical, contemporary composition and now the label most associated with the strand of electronic music that made itself at home on headphones rather than dancefloors.

What the partnership actually includes

Four strands have been announced, and they are all editorial and promotional rather than catalogue changes:

• Curated playlists. Qobuz's editors, Warp artists and the Warp team itself are each contributing selections, housed in a dedicated playlist section on the service.
• Long-form writing in the Qobuz magazine. The programme opens with a feature called "The Warp Story", which What Hi-Fi? reports is already live, with more editorial to follow.
• Discounted downloads. Selected Warp albums are being price-cut in the Qobuz download store. Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II is named by both outlets covering the announcement, and HiFi Pig also names Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children. Neither the size of the discounts nor an end date has been published.
• Artist tribute videos. A progressively released series in which artists talk about their favourite Warp album. The first, featuring Nightmares on Wax, has gone out on Instagram.

Artists named across the coverage give a sense of the slice of the catalogue being spotlighted: Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre, LFO, Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never and Mount Kimbie. That is a lineage running from the label's early bleep-and-bass years through IDM's most abstract period to the present-day roster, and it is a reasonable shorthand for why a hi-res service would want the association.

Why Warp suits a hi-res pitch

There is a neat logic to the pairing that neither party has to spell out. Warp's catalogue has always rewarded close attention — records built from texture, decay, stereo placement and low-level detail rather than from the kind of material that survives a compressed stream on a phone speaker. A label whose signature records are frequently ambient, frequently quiet and frequently dense in the bottom octaves is a natural fit for a platform selling the idea that resolution matters.

Both companies said as much in their own terms. Marc Zisman, Qobuz's Chief Music Officer, described Warp as one of the most respected independent labels in the UK since 1989, and said the label's artistic values remain intact and are shared by Qobuz. Steven Hill, Head of North America at Warp Records, said that connecting deep-listening audiences with uncompromising, visionary music is at the heart of what the label does, calling Qobuz a natural home for its artists. Those are, of course, the statements of two parties promoting a joint campaign — but "deep-listening audiences" is a fairly precise description of the overlap each side is betting on.

What it does not change

It is worth being clear about the limits of the announcement, because label partnerships are easy to over-read. Nothing in the coverage suggests Warp titles are newly arriving on Qobuz, and nothing suggests any change to the resolutions those titles stream or download at. No exclusives, windowed releases or live events have been announced. No duration or end date has been given for the partnership, and no territories have been specified beyond "international". No financial terms were disclosed.

What has changed is visibility. For a catalogue that is more than three and a half decades deep and includes a good deal of material that rarely surfaces in algorithmic recommendations, a few months of front-of-app placement, human-curated playlists and long-form writing is a meaningful piece of shelf space — the streaming equivalent of a record shop giving a label its own end-cap. The download discounts are the commercial end of the same idea: for listeners who buy files rather than rent them, a back catalogue promotion is the moment a long-contemplated purchase gets made.

Part of a broader push

Qobuz has been steadily building partnerships that put it alongside institutions with their own curatorial credibility rather than competing purely on catalogue size or price. Alongside the Blue Note, Deutsche Grammophon and ECM tie-ups, it became the official streaming partner of Rough Trade's stores in May 2026. The Warp deal fits the same strategy: rather than chasing the mainstream, the service keeps attaching itself to names that signal a particular kind of listener — one who still thinks in terms of labels, sleeves and discographies.

For now, the practical takeaway is simple enough. "The Warp Story" is live in the Qobuz magazine, the curated playlists and artist videos are rolling out progressively, and a selection of Warp albums — including the two named above — is carrying reduced prices in the download store for an unspecified period.