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.
you guys need to understand that there are no goodguy rich folk
Those bastards always literally wanting the world at their feet.
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.
Thanks for doing so early legwork on this, I might consider using the site once I check these people out.
wtf are russian billionaires doing supporting America’s attack dog in the middle east anyway?
He’s pro russia, they like that
And America is anti-Russia, so why would they support America’s attack dog?
Trump and his party are ruining that horrible country rapidly so it’s normal a great part of the world likes that.
The slightly less fascist dems keep their regime’s fascism and horrible abuses for their many many foreign wars so the imperialism keeps running like clockwork because their voters who only care about themselves aren’t bothered by what they do elsewhere and don’t need to complain as they do now.
They are here every day crying about how they want to get back to their perfect democracy.
Genocide, regime changes, wars, kids in cages were OK right up to Trump, as long as it didn’t inconvenience them.Ok, but that doesnt answer my question. What does a Russian billionaire get out of supporting Israel?
Well to start he’s not Russian but ukrainian and since decades a western oligarch spendig a lot of time in the US. (but always nice to smear Russia for everything imaginable) Those countries are 2 birds of a feather and support eachother.
And he’s a jewish zionist with a lot of business interests in Shitrael.Have you tagged as sneaky Russian shill and you never seem to disappoint.
LOL can’t take facts?
Anything against western nazi propaganda is a Russian troll.
Pathetic.
The majority of Israelis are of Russian descent
Really sad, I can recommend tidal though
The Same with Telegram, his fiunder - Nikolai Dutov still lives in Russia and CEO lives in UAE.
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?
Go a step further and use something like Deemix to grab FLAC files from their servers
That works too.
Or Tidal-dl-ng for Tidal
This is the only reason to use Deezer.
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.
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.
Oh, my bad: I thought bandcamp was part of the major services. Shows what I know 😅
Problem with Bandcamp is they got bought out, first by Epic Games and then by Songtradr, and each time it’s gone through enshittification. Bandcamp Fridays used to be a weekly thing but got changed to (EDIT: semi-monthly) with little announcement, and then half their staff got laid off to pad the bottom line. Even with all that they’re better than the alternatives, but they’re still on a decaying trajectory.
Yeah I agree with all of this. Shame there isn’t a better option at the moment, but they’re the lesser of a bunch of evils - so I guess I’m sticking with them for a bit longer.
And included in half the staff was every member of their union bargaining committee. The workers got done dirty when that sale to Songtradr happened. I’m not even sure if Songtradr has recognized the union yet. They had just won their election (overwhelmingly) and the sale happened right after that.
Guess how much money the artists get when you do that?
I’ve already addressed this. They don’t get fractions of fractions of a penny.
We know this because Weird Al used his year-end video to make the world aware that, in return for his tens of millions of streams, he got around $80.00 from Spotify for a whole year.
The artists aren’t losing anything meaningful when rip songs off Youtube, but the CEO is for sure, at least he would if we all did this.
If you mean that video where he talked about getting $12 for 80 million streams…he was very clearly taking the piss.
He made closer to $200k, which is still pretty low (hence, the joke) and doesn’t account for his labels cut.
We know this because Weird Al used his year-end video to make the world aware that, in return for his tens of millions of streams, he got around $80.00 from Spotify for a whole year.
How does that work? 10 million Spotify streams should pay more than $20k in royalties.
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
Not at all, that’s a straw man attack and a complete misread of my comment. Acquire reading comprehension skills then come back if you can come up with a non bad-faith comment.
This past week I found DoubleDouble.top which has superior quality that YouTube converters IMHO.
I don’t know if it’s any better than the other options out there, but I like tidal.
Qobuz!
Tidal is cool but it lacks a lot of vocaloid and some japanese songs for me.
Respect their artist payout and the nice link site which lists a bunch of different sources of the shared song, so that Spotify or other streaming users don’t need to manually search for that shared song.
I like him already
Please just tell me that Qobuz is fine. My last straw before going back to piracy.
@Lanske@lemmy.world: Qobuz is awesome and still 100% french. Also the platform which pays artists better then spotify
Bandcamp?
(ignoring the fact that it was owned by Epic. But they still do Bandcamp Friday)I’m trying to focus on European offerings. Bandcamp is based in California, I think. Recent months have shown that US companies cannot be relied on.
Interesting and mostly agreed.
i cant believe Divers Duomo would do this
reputation laundering against Ukraine
What does this mean?
This needs a side of creamy Italian
Never used it because of the stupid name, which happens a lot, figures though. I’ll stick with Bandcamp.
suck deezer nuts
I’ve been on Tidal for some time but noticed that Qobuz has released a connect service that seems to work like Sp*tify Connect so that you can remote control one instance from another. Like, playing music on computer connected to amp can be controlled through the phone.
I’d appreciate if somebody using Qobuz could confirm?
I’m using Qobuz, can confirm, it’s just like Spotify. I use a Raspberry Pi with Qobuz.com open and using my phone as a remote.
Thanks! Do you know if it possible to run Qobuz headless or in a docker container or some of the sort? I did some searching but couldn’t find anything.
I’m using volumio on a RPi4 to do this. It’s, unfortunately another subscription layer, but I got a lifetime license, which they may do again? I believe there are free options too though
Can you start a session where your friends can add music to the queue and control it?
It has shared/collaborative playlists, but I’m not sure about a session queue.
