Yes. It's my go-to example for how we don't need US Americans for capitalists to fuck us over and spend all of their considerable influence to make the world worse.

To me what matters most is not who owns it - on the grounds that all oligarchs are bastards - but where the HQ and operations are.

You're not wrong to call them out, they have a plan to migrate:

Without meaning to, we would be contradicting the spirit of this newsletter. Something similar happened when we chose to host Choosing Europe on Substack. Regarding that subject we are still working on our own solution which is getting closer. It will likely be ready later in February or in early March.

The author assesses both Tidal and Spotify to be no longer under European influence:

To be clear from the beginning, Spotify was founded in Sweden but now operates within financial structures that place it firmly inside the global Big Tech ecosystem.

Similarly, Tidal was founded in Norway, but it now holds a marginal European market share of less than 1% and is controlled by American capital.

Both now operate within financial and corporate structures that place them outside the European sphere of influence. The cultural and economic centre of gravity is no longer European for these companies.

That's mentioned in the article?

To be clear from the beginning, Spotify was founded in Sweden but now operates within financial structures that place it firmly inside the global Big Tech ecosystem.

True, but they have tons and tons of american investors and partners. They are firmly in that grip and also a shit company partnering with military surveillance tech as well as trying to stop paying their artists by stealing their work and making AI slop with it.

Nestle is also European and yet one of the worst companies in the world.

Just because a company is European, doesn't mean they aren't a horrible company that nobody should support or buy a single thing from.

Do you have good sources for buying digital albums apart from bandcamp?

Someone mentioned it the other day, I switched and I'm happy with it so far. The main benefit for me is the native Linux app. It's so much less cluttered than Spotify. Android/Android Auto also work without issues. Good library at a good price.

Same. It’s what I use, I love that you can also BUY music though. Hard to recommend because their user experience needs a lot of work. (Eg. Can’t even change the language. Since I’m in Germany I have no choice but to use German for the ui)

I tried Deezer and Tidal but I missed features I use all the time with Spotify... Namely the ability to control another device, casting and multiple users casting to the same smart device. With these, it makes it quite hard to use alternatives in a shared home. The catalogue is essentially the same.

Yeah indeed! much better the whole albums instead of the endless spotify music diarrhea. Their music picks and magazine are great as well

Really glad I’ve found Qobuz.

I find qobuzs song suggestions to be subpar to my liking and the music keeps buffering for only ten seconds compared to other services that load the whole song. Uk has pretty spotty signal so I end with lots of interruptions. Any advice on how to Improve?

Been self-hosting it for a while now and love it. Try Tempus if you're looking for a good Android client app.

https://www.navidrome.org/

It looks like the availability list was shorter years ago, so maybe they plan, but it's not blazing fast progress for sure

Agree... And it's impossible (at least I couldn't find a way) to use a VPN to use it - you can create the account, but when you set up the card it detects where you're from and don't let you use it. At least this is my experience with them.

I recently made that switch and while the website to transfer playlists gave me errors and missing songs, they were actually in Qobuz nevertheless.

For 1 I can’t say as I don’t use folders.

Kind of same story here, tried qobuz and dropped it almost immediately.

For me, it was the missing assistant integration, as I couldn't get it to properly play music in the car by giving some basic voice commands... If I'm in control of a three ton death machine, I want my eyes on the road, not entering some obscure pop punk band's name in full via the on-screen keyboard in the car's media system. Also, I know that qobuz' content is supposed to be curated instead of generated, but the amount of playlists compared to Spotify was really underwhelming. Add to that that the onboarding was terrible enough for my wife to give up before fully finishing the process and me cursing constantly while trying to set up my kids' accounts, my kids being annoyed they couldn't share music with their friends easily anymore and that it felt oddly hard to discover new music beyond their articles and just based on my preferences and the whole thing just didn't work as I wanted it to.