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.
Never used it because of the stupid name, which happens a lot, figures though. I’ll stick with Bandcamp.
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
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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
Tidal is ok, its american though and they suck.
Tidal was originally European but DayZ bought it up so it’s technically American now; Qobuz is french but it doesn’t have a “brain-dead radio mode”. Both have unofficial Linux clients.
Rn I use tidal because it’s on the top 3 of the ones that pay the most to artists iirc(quobuz is up there too) and it hasn’t had a huge American influence that I know of, but do your own research on the alternatives to see which suits you the most, there are tons of articles about them all.
DayZ
Do you mean Jay-Z?
It’s now owned by Square, the same company behind squarecash
I used it for awhile, specifically because while Spotify promised lossless for years, they never delivered. A bonus is, as you said, that it is the platform that has the highest payout for artists.
That being said, when I stopped using it, it was mostly due the UX decisions they had made on the platform to force videos on everything. It’s a music app, and yet, one of the main navigation options in the app was for videos. Spotify also fired their original designer and has focused on “engagement” over actually good UX.
What’s brain-dead radio?
You click on a genre and let it play mindlessly, like when listening to radio.
It seems to have an endless radio mode. Am I missing something? https://community.qobuz.com/news-en/l2cyyji08ktj0w94hcfcjbbuyui2dw
I was referring to you having a “daily recommendations” playlist that just keeps going after it finished by appending similar music, or “radio based on playlist” kinda things. Also, Qobuz’s recommendations are way too generic, the lists are hand made for everyone which ironically doesn’t cater enough to individual tastes.
Compared to Spotify’s artist/song radio feature, Qobuz attempt at radio is absolutely horrible. They seem to sort everything into a literal handful of genres. The “similarity” seems to stem from song features like “has a singer” and “uses chords”. I switched from Spotify to Qobuz a few months ago, it’s comparable in available content, has much better audio quality but is severely underwhelming for discovering new music.
song features like “has a singer” and “uses chords”
You kids with your newfangled ideas!
Both have unofficial Linux clients.
Qobuz doesn’t?
Sticking with Spotify for now, it supports Linux and has last.fm integration (and is amazing)
https://github.com/mattipunkt/qobuz-linux This is the unofficial client and it’s pretty good
unofficial
You appear to be looking at their official website. Services tend to not advertise unofficial clients
yeah shame
https://www.spotify.com/au/download/linux/
not first class support but close enough i can’t tell the difference
this is where mullvad and spotify are tops to me, no one comes close
uh, same. https://github.com/Mastermindzh/tidal-hifi
In fact spotify doesn’t support arch at all, all there is is user built stuff too. You have a flatpak version of spotify but sod o you of tidal-hifi.
Sorry if I sound rude but your jerking of spotify when it offers the same capabilities of user made stuff rubs me the wrong way.
I’ve been just pondering between tidal and spotify, and I primarily use Linux and Android. Tidal’s client doesn’t seem to support outputting to devices like Wiim in Linux. The Spotify client does.
Spotify’s client can be installed via AUR (a repackaging of that DEB essentially) on Arch Linux.
FWIW, both tidal-hifi and the official spotify client are available in NixOS’s repository.
Yeah I know of the AUR package, in fact I checked right before writing xD, that’s the “user built stuff” I mentioned, since the AUR is the Arch User Repository after all.
About the Wiim, I’m reading about it for the first time but it seems like it’s a LAN based audio device, right? I bet there’s some Linux application that is able to connect to it and create a virtual output device you can pick for the tidal app, or any other audio.
Me from the future before posting the comment: Yeah no, I checked, there isn’t. That’s weird because Wiim does have an open API to send an audio stream into it so you should be able to create an audio stream from any app and then link them… Like, an app that creates a local audio streaming server, links any app output into that server and then sends it to Wiim via its public API. It should be doable and offer a lot more flexibility, but I guess there’s not enough interest for someone to bother doing so. The one doing it should have a WIIM device to test too and the overlap between the people able to do this stuff and the people with a WIIM might not be that big give that’s a device that does a lot of stuff for you in theory.
I bet there’s some Linux application that is able to connect to it and create a virtual output device you can pick for the tidal app, or any other audio.
Yeah I should’ve been more clear what I’m looking for. Obviously I can stream via Bluetooth or perhaps even something like Airplay. But the native Spotify client uses Spotify Connect also on Linux, which means that the device can independently play the music. I just issue it commands from the client.
A similar thing exists for Tidal: Tidal Connect. But unfortunately the Linux client does not support it. Android, MacOS and iOS do, though.
Hi, I’m interested to know what you’re using now!
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.
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.
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
I like him already
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…
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
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 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…
I’m quickly running out of options… Apple Music was honestly really decent, then the US did their thing so I looked for non-US options. One of my requirements is lossless quality, so Spotify is out (regardless of their own ethical issues). Tidal is also out as it has been a US-owned service for a long time. The remaining options are Deezer and Qobuz. Qobuz seems good in terms of ownership and whatnot, but their catalogue is missing things I listen to quite often, or at least it did when I last checked it out a few months ago. I think I’m staying with Deezer for now. It’s not ideal as Access Industries own 41.4% of Deezer whose owner this post is all about, but it’s the least bad of all the options I’ve found. They also don’t have every song I’m interested in, but they’re pretty close.
Doesn’t that make it 41.4% US-owned? I don’t see how your criteria make Deezer better than Apple Music. Plus Access is the same company that owns Warner Music Group, and I’m fairly sure it’s only 41.4% because they later went public in 2022; the 2016 acquisition decision says the percent of Deezer owned by Access is confidential but says Access would have exclusive control. Which also brings the question of where the 41.4% figure is from.
Do you really want to support something that expressly funds the policies and aspects of the US that you hate or something that’s simply based in the US and helped fund just Trump’s inauguration event instead of any policies?
True, which is why I don’t think Deezer is a perfect choice for me either, but at the surface level 41.4% US-owned is better than closer to 100% which all the other services are that meets my requirements. Personally I found that number on the Deezer Wikipedia page, but it is marked with “citation needed”, so it could be completely wrong. And that probably is the case if it’s true that Access bought exclusive control.
“The US that you hate” doesn’t exist. I disagree with a lot of decisions and policies and want better for the American people and the rest of the world that is both directly and indirectly affected, but there’s no hate. But you do make an important point that I hadn’t thought deeply enough about and I agree with you. I believe it’s better to support something that’s simply based in the US rather than the specific policies I disagree with even if it’s more money.
Qobuz would be my choice as it would avoid this dilemma, but their catalogue wasn’t good enough for me the last time I tried it. I’ll have to try again to see if it has gotten better since then. But I have changed my mind and will cancel my Deezer subscription regardless and try to find an alternative. Or maybe I’ll just drop streaming services completely for now as most of my active listening is done with my own local collection anyways and I could always set up a Jellyfin instance if needed.
i’m facing the same dilemma. i just recently left spotify. tidal and qobuz don’t have nearly enough of my favorite music, so i went with deezer. i really don’t want to give apple any more money, but i’m wondering which would be better…
I can recommend Qobuz. I’ve tried a bunch of them and it’s the one I stuck with. Actual high quality audio without ridiculous extra fees, lots of information including CD booklets and complete credits on each track, and they pay the artists a bit more than most streaming services do. I haven’t hit any notable gaps in their catalogue compared to others (though some artists just don’t stream), and they have things Spotify doesn’t have. Qobuz is also better for classical music than others, because they understand how to properly group and credit the tracks.
Thanks for the recommendation. Qobuz has lots if things I would appreciate, but the last time I tried it it was missing a lot of the music I regularly listen to. It has only been a few months since then, but I will give it another try to see if it has changed.
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.
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
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.
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?
host it yourself.
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
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.
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).
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.
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”
They treat non mainstream artists badly. There is no reason why some artist should get bonuses
https://www.musicradar.com/news/universal-deezer-streaming-artist-centric-royalty-model
