Sure, but if you could have Spotify as is, or a light weight player, like WinAMP, both with equal access to the Spotify service, which would you pick?

People aren't using Spotify because the player is fantastic, they use it because Spotify has a huge library, is reasonable price and the player is sort of okay.

Totally agree. But the DRM monster rears its head. Everyone is afraid you'll steal their choons if you're allowed to play them on whatever player you like sigh

Still, all iTunes content can be de-DRM-ed in 500 lines of C code, so it's not like "the industry" actually requires it to be secure.

Like everything these days, it's barely good enough. And why bother implementing your DRM as a 1KB C++ library when you can use a 5MB Objective C framework instead?

Spotify is a case in point: it used to have a fantastic, small and fast native desktop app. It replaced it with the bloated web-based one we see today.

That's an artifact of IP laws. The reason you don't have to curate your own mp3s again is because some service managed to find a way to give you a searchable, streamable collection of music that's also legal. But that in no way implies Spotify needs to be so bloated.

In a better world, you really wouldn't need to. Winamp was great - The weak point was always the playlist editor, but winamp's interface for simply playing music and seeing what was up next was wonderful. Spotify could provide you with a playlist plugin that simply gave a list of URLs, or let you download one that lasted X hours.

Mobile phones happened. Tiny memories while always being connected.