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.
Tidal was originally European but
DayZJay-z 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.
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 to 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
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.
You kids with your newfangled ideas!
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.