The company is Access Industries and the Founder and Owner is Leonard Blavatnik
Along with what’s in the title, he is accused of reputation laundering against Ukraine and has been personally sanctioned by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He was also part of a WhatsApp group involving some of the United States’ most powerful business leaders with the stated goals of “changing the narrative” in favour of Israel and “helping win the war” against Gaza.
Everything is in the linked Wikipedia article about him, mostly under the “Controversies and disputes” part.
I switched to Deezer after seeing it recommended as a better Spotify alternative here on Lemmy, but after finding all this I immediately stopped using it. It’s as bad as the shit Spotify does and has done IMO. I’m not here to recommend or push an alternative, but if I can give info on what I use now if someone asks.
wtf are russian billionaires doing supporting America’s attack dog in the middle east anyway?
He’s pro russia, they like that
Those bastards always literally wanting the world at their feet.
Fuck streaming. Pirate all the things!
Libraries have a ton of CDs too… even newer ones.
Yep, but only local artists, this is why I buy CDs when I travel internationally.
That’s how I know my money doesn’t end on fifhty hands!
I just wish more artists had like a direct donation address (or do some direct sales on their website), without absolutely any intermediates, so I could pay them for their work. But I’d rather not pay anything that pay most of my money to undeserving people.
Bandcamp should be used by more musicians.
None of the online music streamers are ethical. Every single one, to varying degrees, robs the artists and enriches their CEO’s and shareholders.
Do the ethical thing.
Don’t use them, and instead, use a Youtube-to-MP3 converter and steal the music.
I dunno, Qobuz seems pretty fucking solid, and still allows for purchasing your music directly in FLAC and other formats. What drama is there about them?
This past week I found DoubleDouble.top which has superior quality that YouTube converters IMHO.
Bandcamp is pretty good, though. Especially on Bandcamp Fridays where all the profits go to the artists. Plus, I like getting FLACs.
Absolutely. At the end of the day the main point here is just don’t use the major streaming services.
Are you under the impression that this will pay any artist anything?
It’s fine to take a pro-piracy stance, but pretending that you’re doing it out of concern for the artists is grade A-bullshit.
You’re right.
I should figure out a way to replace the income these artists get for my individual stream. It comes out to fractions upon fractions of a penny.
The point here is robbing the CEO. There’s no meaningful impact to the artist (unless you’re Taylor Swift) thanks to the way these services are structured.
I have some music on streaming services, and get a couple of coins every month. If you pirate my music instead, I’ll get nothing.
Set up a Patreon and offer exclusive music content to subscribers, sell directly to fans through Bandcamp. With good marketing and social media presence you would get several times what any streaming service will pay you ever. Even if most people are pirating your music. If you are being pirated, you are worth listening to, and that means that people are willing to pay you something. I tell this to all aspiring musicians, companies are not your friend, labels are not your buddies. The pirate is not your enemy, the megabillionaire monopolistic corp is. Many musicians owe their popularity because a music pirate put their stuff online and got them noticed.
Are you suggesting in the end here that music pirates are paying artists in exposure? Musicians really can’t catch a break SMH
Go a step further and use something like Deemix to grab FLAC files from their servers
Or Tidal-dl-ng for Tidal
This is the only reason to use Deezer.
That works too.
As a fan I kinda view the music business this way
- Your music brings me in
- You make money off selling ads on your videos and content and platforms
- You make money selling merch
- You make money doing shows
- You MIGHT make a little streaming, but it won’t be much
That’s how I see it.
I saw a documentary one, and one artist said: back in the days, you made shows to sell your music (vinyl, later CDs), but now you make music to go on tour and make shows.
I switched to Deezer because I found reasons why all of the others were unethical. What would you suggest for a streaming service whose services are ethical?
Pirate everything. Pay directly to artists only when they allow you to do so (like direct sales on their website). If they don’t allow you to make money go to them without also paying pigs then don’t pay them at all.
What options are there for pirating music? I felt Lidarr was not particularly useful due to the lack of indexers. Unless you like mainstream music it’s quite difficult to find many tracks online (and I’m too picky to be okay with YouTube rips).
Considering music streaming isn’t fragmented in the same way video streaming is, it’s still well worth paying for a music streaming service as part of a family plan imo. There’s no other hassle free solution to instantly listen to anything I want and be recommended new tracks based on my listening preferences.
I don’t think there’s any particularly “ethical” option, until now I’ve just used Spotify knowing that they’re losing money anyway. But it turns out they posted their first profitable year last year so who knows what the move is now. Qobuz claims to be ethical and high quality, but I don’t know how good the library is and like with any company they can become evil later.
Soulseek has practically everything, outside of the most niche stuff
i wish people would understand that copyright and the entire existing economic system built around art are all intended to oppress the little guy.
i think getting a grip on what you just said here is probably the first sort of real step in that direction for people.
can’t even count the number of times i’ve had someone respond to me with some variation of “oh so you don’t care about the artists’ WORK/LABOR/BALLS then, do you??” as some sort of accusation because i said something negative about copyright… when that’s not remotely the case - for me it’s based in a sentiment very similar to this ethos here regarding piracy. to me, the brain dead people rabidly defending a system where leeches can MitM artists and their clients are the ones who don’t care about artists or their work.
I would personally suggest Qobuz, as it is demonstrably the service that pays artists the most and has multiple tiers of lossless audio options. The next best thing would be to buy from artists directly, whenever possible (maybe even physical media, if you have a good sound system for that).
People here advocating for piracy sound cute, but I wonder how actual musicians would feel about that.
Download MP3’s or FLAC’s
I’m autistic. If I’m not using some kind of a subscription service I will end up listening to the same one song on repeat literally thousands of times until I hate it. I would prefer to not hate songs I used to love. It’s happened too much. I need some kind of service to introduce new music into my rotation.
Download thousands of songs. Use a service like Lidarr to automatically download new releases or import entire genres using MusicBrainz collections
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism
host it yourself.
I literally switched from Spotify yesterday…
Everyone says bandcamp is a good alternative but the main added value from streaming services, for me, is discovery. I don’t think I can afford the time to go on bandcamp and download every song I like one by one. I would also be lost when in need to discover new music.
My biggest issue with Bandcamp is that there’s so many artists I listen to that just aren’t on there.
I like Tidal, it pays the artists the most of all services.
Tidal might pay the most of streaming services (others in here are claiming it’s Qobuz) but Bandcamp pays the most to artists in general as the purchases pay much higher than streams. Bandcamp charge 15%, everything else goes to the band/label until they hit $5k in sales, and then Bandcamp’s fee drops to 10% and stays there for additional sales. If you wait to buy in bulk on ‘Bandcamp Fridays’, which happen about 10 times a year, the artists take 100% on those days.
Imo Bandcamp is by far the best service for supporting artists.
i cant believe Divers Duomo would do this
Since we are on this topic I would incentivise everyone to take a look at resonate.
They are, AFAIK, the only music streaming service where artists, workers and listeners are owners (aka it’s a cooperative)
This is an interesting idea, but I find their catalogue to be quite terrible for me (so far). Service like this really, really needs big names and much broader catalogue to attract people and start moving. Even though I’m far far from listening to mainstream I literally could not find a single interpret I looked for, and believe me I tried.
This is an interesting idea, but I would assume that over time, the number of “owned” streams would dominate the number of “new” streams, and thus eventually their operating costs would reach a point where they don’t have the revenue to cover it…
I guess it depends on how much new music is released, added to the library, and then streamed by the users. It’s a valid concern to be sure, but I wonder if it could be offset by user growth and new music to be a non issue
At that point their governance structure would show it’s strengths by enabling a democratic decision taking that could solve the issue
Workers, for example, could suggest a small subscription fee that would cover the infrastructure cost, while listeners will most likely object, their view would be valued and impact the approval of any proposed solution
That’s fair, just…for this to scale, it needs to be competitive with existing streaming services. And if the experience for a listener is the same whether a democratic panel raises prices, or greedy enshittification raises prices, there’s not going to be an upside.
To me, the potential upside is identifying the problems with their revenue stream now out in the open, and addressing it now, rather than trying to build a captive audience now and pivot to something more sustainable later (as is the strategy for capitalist startups).
Its not even a flatrate
The pricing looks like its stacking quick if you do neither listen to the same songs over and over or entirely new ones, i dont know if I find the pricing fair for the consumer.
Yeah this is not a transparent pricing model. You start at $0.025 and “go up” from there but I can’t find how much. After you listen to a song 9 times and have paid $1.40 you “own” it but can still only listen to it on their service?
This sounds like iTunes with more steps.
I’m not sure where you get the information that it’s not DRM free
They explicitly say you can download songs while not mentioning the inclusion of any DRM
I’m curious where you found that
Looks like new sign ups are paused right now, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
Uuuugh shit, I liked Deezer. :(
Ok, so, Qobuz then?
Edit tired of jumping ship all the time. Going to try going back to local rips and jellyfin server.
Your subscription costs as much as a CD and a half each month.
Go buy your music and host a jellyfin instance, stop paying these fuckin scammers
Qobuz sells music as well. It’s not just for streaming. High quality downloadable FLAC audio too.
I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I’m not doing that anymore.
I don’t think they are all scammers. It is convenient.
But maybe it is time to just go back to the 80s and make mixtapes off of the radio.
I’ll consider your suggestion. I’d need a CD reader again to make lossless rips. It’s been awhile.
And it DOES give me an excuse to selfhost another thing.
I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I’m not doing that anymore.
This is how the music industry is screwing artists.
Think about it. Hollywood is union, which ensures money and jobs make it down to every blue collar worker involved in every Netflix-funded project. But music isn’t union, there’s just a bunch of random bands, and middlemen who will gladly take everything. The record labels and streaming services turn a profit, pay their execs, and get away with sending fractions of a cent per play to the artists. Most artists don’t post to streaming services for the money, they do it just for the convenience of fans.
Giving money directly to an artist in exchange for their tracks or merch (CDs, Vinyls, etc) is the best way to fund an artist. Bandcamp is another middleman that enables this, but at least they have Bandcamp Fridays periodically, which is where they waive their cut and give the bulk of your payment directly to the artist.
IMO buying tracks on Bandcamp Friday + self-hosting Plex/Jellyfin + using Plexamp/Finamp on mobile is the best way to support music right now, and also future proofs your library.
Bandcamp Friday this Friday!
Time to buy everything from Gunship! XD
It also kind of forces you to consume music in a more focused way. Instead of cycling through hundreds of songs in a few minutes you are forced to preselect what you really want to hear. Which has both its pros and cons, but I enjoy the “slow pace” when discovering new songs.
Sooo, Qobuz?
Yes. They’re pretty good
Why are you paying these oligarchs at all? Pirate your music
Well, I’m not opposed to paying for a convenient service that gets money to the artist.
Of course, the more they enshittify and mistakenly believe they are indispensable, then yes, the more I return to the high seas.
Blavatnik was a member of a WhatsApp group chat that existed from November 2023 until early May 2024 involving some of the United States’ most powerful business leaders with the stated goals of “chang[ing] the narrative” in favor of Israel and “help[ing] win the war” on U.S. public opinion following Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel.
Ah, every single rich person. So predictable at this point it’s like a Tinder profile. It’s what most billionaires are and what most right-wing idiots want to become.
50m (I just spent 50 million dollars for a party for rich people)
Likes: Tyranny, Autocrats, Colonialism, Wealth Gaps, Kids (Yeah like that 😉), Abrahamic Religions, Unobstructed Hypercapitalism
Dislikes: Unions, Social Progress, Clean Air & Water (except for me lol duh), Equality, Regulation, The EU, “Other Races”
I’ve been buying mostly mostly from Bandcamp. It’s worked out well. I have a big library, and the people making music got paid.
FYI bandcamp was acquired by Epic and subsequently sold to Songtrader 2023
Really it was re-sold I actually didn’t know that.
I don’t know much about Songtradr, all I can find is that they let half the bandcamp staff go when they took over, is it a well known company?
Its an Australian company founded by this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wiltshire and this guy https://www.songtradr.com/helge
Songtradr is a fairly boring ecommerce platform for music from what I can read. Boring is good though, I don’t see any dramas / issues in my brief web traipsing.
I don’t know if it’s any better than the other options out there, but I like tidal.
Qobuz!
The best Russian music service ever was allofmp3. Sadly long gone but fondly remembered.
It was just a pirate server that charged for mp3s you realize, none of that money ever went to the artists.
I never understood the appeal over Soulseek/emule (at the time).
I am buying music as much as I can, and build my own streaming service with Jellyfin. To this day, Bandcamp is were you can find the most music for purchase but not all artists are there. Often, I don’t find any place to purchase albums from artists, then I pirate as a last resort, sorry for that. I’ll go to the concerts when I get the chance, to make up for it.
Surprised nobody mentioned 7digital, a store to buy music in mp3 or FLAC format. They have both mainstream and niche stuff
7digital is owned by the same people as Bandcamp BTW. Not that it changes your point, just interesting.
If you want to support local business, you could dig through some crates at a record store. Most shops have metric shitloads of CDs on the cheap. Idk if lossless audio is a big deal to you but that’s a surefire way to get lossless files too
I appreciate lossless quality, although I don’t have any fancy audio equipment at this time. When I move to a bigger place, maybe I’ll start to build a CD collection. I’m not so much into Vinyls, somehow they are so popular right now that artists will release a vinyl disk buy no download nor CD purchase possible…
He also owns Warner Music, so revenue from that David Bowie or Charli XCX track you stream goes to his empire.
He can take Bowie if he wants, but Charli??? This is not what PC Music fought for :(
Either of themCharli could stop working with Warner Music, she isn’t a slaveEdit: I originally said David Bowie, too, meaning his estate, but they sold all of the rights of his music to Warner
Well, David Bowie stopped working for anyone years ago. RIP
Oh, yeah sorry, I guess I meant his estate, though it’s certainly possible that Warner just now owns his music in perpetuity
Depending on the contract she signed: maybe not.
Then she has a shit agent, who probably has an in with Warner. Record labels should be competing for wildly popular artists, not the inverse
You don’t usually sign those contracts when you have leverage. But heard
Uhhh… not sure Bowie can do much
Yeah I meant his estate, but I updated my comment, because it appears his estate sold all the rights of his music to Warner
