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.
Qobuz doesn’t?
Sticking with Spotify for now, it supports Linux and has last.fm integration (and is amazing)
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.
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.
Okay, understood, so the idea is that the device connects to the streaming service independently and the PC client acts as a glorified remote. Sad that it doesn’t work.
Would it work with the mobile tidal app? Just curious, since that might be better as a “remote” than a static desktop pc.
https://github.com/mattipunkt/qobuz-linux This is the unofficial client and it’s pretty good
They have a web player that’s OS agnostic and can Bluetooth link multiple devices.
But then, you use Spotify so your ethical considerations are pretty loose anyway.