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.
Really sad, I can recommend tidal though
Qobuz is awesome and still 100% french. Also the platform which pays artists better then spotify
Thanks, I’ll prefer Bandcamp.
Now seriously: Does Qobuz have a equal catalog to Spotify and a bigger/more mainstream catalog than Bandcamp?
Yes, Qobuz is significantly more mainstream than BandCamp. I don’t know if the catalogue is on par with Spotify or AM or whatever, but most popular music is on it.
Bandcamp is like an indie zine that occasionally ships with a burned CD from a local band that has to live in the same rented house with no A/C and a half empty bottle of makers mark in the fridge.
Qobuz is a record store.
Holy shit 😂😂 Accurate
Good to know.
Didnt get that impression from Bandcamp but maybe that depends on the artists you listen so.
I’d say I get the impression way more with Soundcloud.
you guys need to understand that there are no goodguy rich folk
YSK he’s ukrainian and has since decades lived in the west, US/Shitrael.
He’s a jewish zionist POS.
So he’s a western oligarch, but don’t let facts keep you from blaming ‘the Russians’YSK that he grew up in Yaroslavl, Russia to Russian-speaking Jewish parents. Calling him “Ukrainian” just because he was born in Odesa during the Soviet Union is misleading. He had/has close ties to the Russian state and became wealthy off of Russian oil and aluminium deposits in the 90s.
So yes, you can blame “the Russians”, but you should rather blame the system.
He emigrated to the US in 1978.
He has dual US/UK citizenship,like many horrible zionists. Studied at Columbia.
“became wealthy off of Russian oil and aluminium deposits in the 90s.”
Like many western oligarch who leeched the ex-soviet states under Gorbachev and Yeltzin, the sell outs.
These are facts, completely ridiculous to demonise Russia for this american-brit POS just bcs he has Russian roots.
" but you should rather blame the system."
What system?
If you mean the US/UK horrible imperialist and colonial warmongers and genocide supporters causing misery in the world then yes.
Glad they are circling the drain, their time is over.
You can cry about evil Russia, China or whatever, that won’t change reality.You know what’s completely ridiculous? Your black or white view of the world. Reality is that there is no benevolent state or any kind of financially succesful entity that isn’t built on some form of exploitation. The Western system is evil. So is Russia for sure. China. UAE and the Saudis. You have India now rising by building strong ties with USA and Israel. There’s no geopolitical force that’s built on good. That you’re incapable of realising that and just go “West bad so everyone else good” is quite telling about you. Besides, Russian Jews - strongly overrepresented in the oligarchs statistics - traditionally have strong ties to the Israeli state and Zionism. Russia’s - like everyone else’s - current interests are only based on what they perceive to be the most gainful. If Putin could’ve benefitted from siding with Israel instead of the China-Iran-Assad axis he would’ve done so immediately. To even suggest that Russia is anti-Zionist out of benevolence is insane.
Besides you now say he has “Russian roots” but right before you were attempting to convince people that he was “Ukrainian”. So
There is no discussion which one is the evil one.
The US (and vasals) with it’s eternal wars, meddling and regime changes, 800 bases around the world threatening their enemies.
Or Russia, that had no choice but to react against NATO and their expansion right up to the border with the inevitability of nukes too close to defend against.
Oh no, they’re so horrible!
Really give it up, the majority of the world doesn’t give a fuck about the western russophobia and knows who’s at fault.
Asia, Africa or S-America know who to xhose between Russia, China or ‘the west’ who have done nothing their entire existance but colonialism and leeching.
Now go cry somewhere else, you bore me and haven’t got a leg to stand on.
Might as well be shilling for Shitrael, which I also have no tolerance for.
Blocking you.Don’t you tell me Russia hasn’t been waging wars. That’s an insane statement. Even looking past Ukraine, since the breakdown of the Russian Empire 2.0 (aka the Soviet Union) Russia has invaded Georgia twice, Transnistria, Chechnya twice, and Dagestan, as well as having upheld Al-Assad’s regime - don’t tell me that guy isn’t evil even if he stood up to Israel - and are now heavily involved in Burkina Faso, Mali, and the CAR. Now do you want to talk about all the shit Russia got up to between 1920 - 1991? Or the countless genocides of the Russian Empire as well as the continuous oppression of ethnic minorities in the Caucasus and Siberia, including using them as human meat shields in Ukraine?
The West deserves hate, but so does Russia. Don’t be a tankie idiot. No one is choosing Russia because Russia isn’t that important anymore. Others are choosing China and that makes sense.
Please just tell me that Qobuz is fine. My last straw before going back to piracy.
@[email protected]: 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.
Get Tidal instead
Or better yet buy directly from the artist
I don’t understand the mental gymnastics some people do to reach the conclusion that piracy is the “ethical thing” to do. What about the artists? How is that any better for us? If you all pirate then we go from getting peanuts to getting nothing.
In fact, piracy sort of birthed streaming in the first place. There were Limewire and Napster, then streaming platforms came along to basically legalize piracy… Hell, the Spotify CEO used to be the CEO of uTorrent
People used to upload pirated music to YouTube. So you know what happened? YouTube came up with their song detection system that now pays artists when their track is streamed, even if it was uploaded by someone else. Even if it plays in the background of a vlog. See what I mean? Legalized piracy.
PS: I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed
Tidal is ok, its american though and they suck.
Oh no what will Taylor Swift do? Pirating from someone with $30 versus $2 billion are 2 very different things, bud. Plus non megastar artists typically make more of their money from things like performances and merch these days.
Well if you only listen to Taylor Swift then that’s valid, but most people have a more diverse music taste so for them this doesn’t apply. The artists I personally listen to (and the labels they’re signed to) are often relatively small and genuine, and to them every bit of income is appreciated. Obviously merch, shows, and direct music sales help more, but getting paid more by streaming services sure would help a great deal as well.
the megastars aren’t the ones we care about making money, they’re fine. it’s the 99% of the rest of the artists that either get screwed by the labels or are independent and rely on fan support
I use refreezer lol
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)
Looks like new sign ups are paused right now, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
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
It’s still not possible, according to the FAQ: Q: Can I download music I own on Resonate? A: In the future, we intend to offer the ability to download tracks that you own on Resonate to your local device. This feature is not yet available.
So for now, it’s just streaming.
Oh wow, so you never own anything then
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…
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).
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
Even if we assume there’s an achievable rate of growth that can consistently outpace owned plays at any given time, as with every business, there will come a day when growth slows. And at that point, they’ll be forced to solve the problem.
And then there’s all the questions of, can I download my tracks to play offline? What if they go out of business? How many artists/labels are even going to agree to this? What about tracks I buy outside of their platform? And what does “own” actually mean given that you never “own” music you buy physical media for, you don’t have any copyright, you can’t play that media for profit, you just have a license to listen to that copy personally. By default the artist “owns” their art. But do they have to give that ownership up to the co-op?
It’s going to be tough to convince people who don’t care to switch away from spotify, and there’s no reason for someone who can self-host to use it unless it’s somehow more effective at funding musicians than just buying their tracks directly.
I wish them luck making the idea work, but I think they have their work cut out for them.
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.
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.
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?
Bandcamp is pretty good, though. Especially on Bandcamp Fridays where all the profits go to the artists. Plus, I like getting FLACs.
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 quarterly 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.
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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.
This past week I found DoubleDouble.top which has superior quality that YouTube converters IMHO.
deleted by creator
You lost?
Fuck streaming. Pirate all the things!
Any way to get recommendations while pirating?
Last.fm, but pay the artists somehow, concerts, merch or imo one of the streaming platforms.
Those duckers, who used to have a free database where users would collect users ’ playing list until they decided they have enough and turned into a subscription?
Thanks but maybe I’m a bit slow, how does that work?
Say I use
mplayeroraplayto play from my local~/Music/directory, or even VLC to play from my minidlna server on my RaspberryPi. Say I play a tune namedtune.oggwhich has metadata saying “Tsunami” by the artist “R3HAB” and it ends. How could my player then pick the next song, from my library or elsewhere, not randomly but rather because it’s related somehow to this song?Oh, I took your original question more generically. You can use last.fm to provide you with recommendations in general according to what you listen to (after scrobbling your library for a while), but acquiring the recommendations (and/or integrating into your active playlist) is a whole other thing. I’m sure it’s possible but I don’t know of out of the box way. Might be a plugin or something out there for it somewhere. That’s why the convenience of streaming can be pretty nice.
Potential paths that could be interesting :
- LMS as full solution with Web interface including recommendations and with live instance to test
- Github tag https://github.com/topics/music-recommendation-system
- mahalanobis distance as plugin for bliss https://github.com/Polochon-street/blissify-rs?tab=readme-ov-file#metric-learning
- Yandex Yambda model https://huggingface.co/datasets/yandex/yambda
- API to rely on SoundCloud https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api/explorer/open-api#/tracks/get_tracks__track_urn__related
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 way the artists get even less than with Spotify.
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.
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.
I buy my music on Bandcamp and Qobuz and put it on my Jellyfin server. It’s great! Also I don’t need 10.000 songs at once so it’s not really that expensive, I end up paying a little more a month now than for streaming, but I build up a library of music I actually like and don’t have to think about losing it when yhe service get shit.
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
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
Qobuz sells music as well. It’s not just for streaming. High quality downloadable FLAC audio too.
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.
Btw, afaik we are now at a point where artists earn next to nothing from streaming and make the bulk of the money from tours, shows and the like.
Most of the money from your streaming subscription goes either to the service provider (Spotify, Apple etc) or to the major label.
I feel you. Yeah I think I’m out on streaming services. They killed the golden goose.
I’m going back to 1984. XD
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.
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.
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…
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.
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”
