Where does music come from that streams?

You can’t just take a cd or lp, digitize it, put it on a server and start charging people to stream it. You have to have a contract with the record company that owns the rights to the music, and they will send you a digital file, as cleeds said above, and whatever other information the deal calls for,

So many versions exist on qobuz of the same album.  Frankly I don't know what the record companies sent over.

I don't care about the licensing.  Tidal crops the top on the bottom of the frequency ranges to do their stupid Mqa crap. Sucks.

I wish qobuz did a better job of updating their material with roon. So many times I search on roon it's not there and then I search on qobuz and find it. Why is that?

As stated above, Qobuz gets its files directly from the record companies that control the content. Qobuz never gets within a country mile of a master tape - they just take whatever digital files are given to them. There is good evidence that some of their files are actually MP3 quality that has been put in FLAC format (you can test the bit rate in Audirvana and other computer music programs). This is not Qobuz' fault. They came that way from the record company.

I have never seen information about how the record companies come up with the digital files they submit to Qobuz. As far as I know, this part of the process is a black box. I would think that they would generally use the WAV file from the latest version of each title but who knows?

FWIW, I have compared several CDs to their Qobuz counterparts, being careful to use the same version, and they have all sounded identical to me.

It doesn’t matter to me.   I can listen to almost anything and it all sounds just fine or better.  

It originates in Music Heaven.