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.
I switched to Deezer because I found reasons why all of the others were unethical. What would you suggest for a streaming service whose services are ethical?
I would personally suggest Qobuz, as it is demonstrably the service that pays artists the most and has multiple tiers of lossless audio options. The next best thing would be to buy from artists directly, whenever possible (maybe even physical media, if you have a good sound system for that).
People here advocating for piracy sound cute, but I wonder how actual musicians would feel about that.
Download MP3’s or FLAC’s
I’m autistic. If I’m not using some kind of a subscription service I will end up listening to the same one song on repeat literally thousands of times until I hate it. I would prefer to not hate songs I used to love. It’s happened too much. I need some kind of service to introduce new music into my rotation.
Download thousands of songs. Use a service like Lidarr to automatically download new releases or import entire genres using MusicBrainz collections
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism
host it yourself.