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.

        • utopiah@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          Thanks but maybe I’m a bit slow, how does that work?

          Say I use mplayer or aplay to play from my local ~/Music/ directory, or even VLC to play from my minidlna server on my RaspberryPi. Say I play a tune named tune.ogg which 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?

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      22·
      3 months ago

      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.