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.
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)
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
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.
I think that’s all fair.
I was really interested in the idea of using it as a way of growing my offline and/or self hosted collection. Fair compensation for artists while still being able to have good new music discovery and grow my library at the same time would be really cool.
Still to be seen if they can manage, to your point, but I’ll hold out a little hope until they lose their goodwill
Yeah, i couldn’t find anywhere on their site that indicated I would be able to download tracks I own. That would change the equation I think. Then maybe they only charge for streaming and track download bandwidth. I could behind something like that. Then it feels like a better version of Bandcamp.
Currently I use Tidal to supplement my self-hosted library, but that’s primarily due to music selection and artist compensation. If they didn’t have random tracks I want to play, I would use something else.
I think the stream to own MP3 like you just downloaded from Bandcamp or something definitely has to be the model from the start. Then they can tweak it from there.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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”
Fuck streaming. Pirate all the things!
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.
That way the artists get even less than with Spotify.
Any way to get recommendations while pirating?
Last.fm, but pay the artists somehow, concerts, merch or imo one of the streaming platforms.
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
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?
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.
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.Holy shit 😂😂 Accurate
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.
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’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.
you guys need to understand that there are no goodguy rich folk
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
host it yourself.
As a music artist and software engineer, I wish more self hosted options were accessible. I’ve tried and stopped a few times to build an open source platform like that but there’s always some kind of software knowledge needed, whether it be just for deploying. Faircamp is a really neat project, but it’s not really accessible to most artists. Till then I think Bandcamp is the best option.
For me personally, I’m no longer planning to release music to most of the streaming services. It’ll be either sold directly on my website using Stripe for payments or via Bandcamp.
There are ways import downloaded music to local libraries on apps like Spotify which helps a bit. But still an inconvenience for the average fan of music that just wants to search or discover and hit play.
