Yes, Qobuz is significantly more mainstream than BandCamp. I don’t know if the catalogue is on par with Spotify or AM or whatever, but most popular music is on it.

Bandcamp is like an indie zine that occasionally ships with a burned CD from a local band that has to live in the same rented house with no A/C and a half empty bottle of makers mark in the fridge.

Qobuz is a record store.

Problem with Bandcamp is they got bought out, first by Epic Games and then by Songtradr, and each time it’s gone through enshittification. Bandcamp Fridays used to be a weekly thing but got changed to quarterly with little announcement, and then half their staff got laid off to pad the bottom line. Even with all that they’re better than the alternatives, but they’re still on a decaying trajectory.

Absolutely. At the end of the day the main point here is just don’t use the major streaming services.

You’re right.

I should figure out a way to replace the income these artists get for my individual stream. It comes out to fractions upon fractions of a penny.

The point here is robbing the CEO. There’s no meaningful impact to the artist (unless you’re Taylor Swift) thanks to the way these services are structured.

This is the only reason to use Deezer.

That works too.

Or Tidal-dl-ng for Tidal

I’ve already addressed this. They don’t get fractions of fractions of a penny.

We know this because Weird Al used his year-end video to make the world aware that, in return for his tens of millions of streams, he got around $80.00 from Spotify for a whole year.

The artists aren’t losing anything meaningful when rip songs off Youtube, but the CEO is for sure, at least he would if we all did this.

I saw a documentary one, and one artist said: back in the days, you made shows to sell your music (vinyl, later CDs), but now you make music to go on tour and make shows.

Yep, but only local artists, this is why I buy CDs when I travel internationally.

Bandcamp should be used by more musicians.

Last.fm, but pay the artists somehow, concerts, merch or imo one of the streaming platforms.

He emigrated to the US in 1978.
He has dual US/UK citizenship,like many horrible zionists. Studied at Columbia.
“became wealthy off of Russian oil and aluminium deposits in the 90s.”
Like many western oligarch who leeched the ex-soviet states under Gorbachev and Yeltzin, the sell outs.
These are facts, completely ridiculous to demonise Russia for this american-brit POS just bcs he has Russian roots.
" but you should rather blame the system."
What system?
If you mean the US/UK horrible imperialist and colonial warmongers and genocide supporters causing misery in the world then yes.
Glad they are circling the drain, their time is over.
You can cry about evil Russia, China or whatever, that won’t change reality.

I’m trying to focus on European offerings. Bandcamp is based in California, I think. Recent months have shown that US companies cannot be relied on.

the megastars aren’t the ones we care about making money, they’re fine. it’s the 99% of the rest of the artists that either get screwed by the labels or are independent and rely on fan support

Well if you only listen to Taylor Swift then that’s valid, but most people have a more diverse music taste so for them this doesn’t apply. The artists I personally listen to (and the labels they’re signed to) are often relatively small and genuine, and to them every bit of income is appreciated. Obviously merch, shows, and direct music sales help more, but getting paid more by streaming services sure would help a great deal as well.

i wish people would understand that copyright and the entire existing economic system built around art are all intended to oppress the little guy.

i think getting a grip on what you just said here is probably the first sort of real step in that direction for people.

can’t even count the number of times i’ve had someone respond to me with some variation of “oh so you don’t care about the artists’ WORK/LABOR/BALLS then, do you??” as some sort of accusation because i said something negative about copyright… when that’s not remotely the case - for me it’s based in a sentiment very similar to this ethos here regarding piracy. to me, the brain dead people rabidly defending a system where leeches can MitM artists and their clients are the ones who don’t care about artists or their work.

What options are there for pirating music? I felt Lidarr was not particularly useful due to the lack of indexers. Unless you like mainstream music it’s quite difficult to find many tracks online (and I’m too picky to be okay with YouTube rips).

Considering music streaming isn’t fragmented in the same way video streaming is, it’s still well worth paying for a music streaming service as part of a family plan imo. There’s no other hassle free solution to instantly listen to anything I want and be recommended new tracks based on my listening preferences.

I don’t think there’s any particularly “ethical” option, until now I’ve just used Spotify knowing that they’re losing money anyway. But it turns out they posted their first profitable year last year so who knows what the move is now. Qobuz claims to be ethical and high quality, but I don’t know how good the library is and like with any company they can become evil later.

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.

Had the same issue, but between Bandcamp and Qobuz I find I’m not lacking much. Since I’m buying the songs anyway I don’t care too much about having multiple apps for my music.

Tidal might pay the most of streaming services (others in here are claiming it’s Qobuz) but Bandcamp pays the most to artists in general as the purchases pay much higher than streams. Bandcamp charge 15%, everything else goes to the band/label until they hit $5k in sales, and then Bandcamp’s fee drops to 10% and stays there for additional sales. If you wait to buy in bulk on ‘Bandcamp Fridays’, which happen about 10 times a year, the artists take 100% on those days.

Imo Bandcamp is by far the best service for supporting artists.

Of course it was piracy but it was friction free piracy. Not just the price which was low but having a really cool webstore and client application. There was nothing that the music industry offered that was remotely comparable in terms of the convenience that allofmp3 offered at the time.