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.
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.
