puntinoblue

Legally speaking, it’s kidnapping - a U.S. indictment doesn’t override Venezuelan sovereignty or the UN Charter.

“Plausible deniability” is being misused here. The EU didn’t carry out the action and isn’t denying responsibility. What you’re describing is what you see as a diplomatic or strategic ambiguity - i.e. dissatisfaction with the strength or clarity of condemnation.

The EU has repeatedly stated that Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition. A “peaceful transition” is not a military operation. In EU language it means elections, negotiations, and constitutional processes. Illegitimacy does not equal a green light for foreign force.

Not sure what the problem with the numbers is. Piracy = 0% to artists, Bandcamp = around 80% after fees and Visa, Spotify = pays rights holders around 70% of gross revenue, and artists often see 20% or less from labels. Blaming Spotify misses the real problem: labels control the payouts, not the platform.

I get that you promote your business a saviour, but how do people find the artists they want to go see without streaming or distribution platforms?

I agree, competition for YouTube is hard to see as anything but positive. And I’m also struck by how one-dimensional many of the comments are.

Spotify has effectively been turned into a stand-in for the structural failures of streaming, while other Big Tech platforms escape serious scrutiny. That kind of selective critique is revealing.

At a cultural level, it’s fascinating: drop a few well-worn trigger terms into the conversation and bots barely need to do anything - humans complete the loop themselves. I suspect this period will be looked back on as an object lesson in narrative engineering.

So let me get this straight: Anna’s Archive taking 100% from artists = good, Bandcamp taking ~20% = good, but Spotify taking ~30% = bad? That suggests the issue isn’t artist pay, it’s just which platform you’ve decided to hate.

And Anna’s Archive’s framing around ‘free access to culture’ seems to mean free for scraping and ideological cover, but for-profit when it’s packaged and sold to AI companies. That’s not anarchy - it’s anarcho-capitalism.

Isn’t that just stealing royalties from the musicians?

Spotify often gets bad press, some probably promoted by competitors. Its payouts look lower mainly because it offers a free ad-supported tier and serves markets with lower subscription fees - if it were subscription-only in high-fee markets, payouts would be similar to Apple, Tidal, or Qobuz. Also, I haven’t seen Spotify play me any AI-generated tracks, unlike some other platforms.

I’m not so sure. Last time I looked for an album it was cheaper on Qobuz than Bandcamp - also Qobuz had a Hi-Res version. Bandcamp I think takes 15% + payment handling which seems a lot for being a shopfront. I went to record label to get it in the end as I thought that was probably the best way of getting the money to the artist.

Proton has a free tier for email, calendar, Drive, password manager. They may do other things too but those are the 4 that I use.