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.
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.
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 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
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.