We started with Spotify pulling a douchey anticompetitive move, and ended up at
> Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.
Somewhere along the way we've gotten lost. The only convenience of Spotify over Winamp is "social sharing"? Am I taking the bait here or do you actually believe this? How can you believe this?
What about the convenience of being able to play a massive amount of music without having to download and store it on your device? What about facilitating new music discovery? How did you come up with social sharing of all things as the honorable mention Spotify has over Winamp, when the latter is desktop software that requires you to manage all your music on your own?
I can understand if you don't personally value Spotify because you like owning media with no restrictions. But I can't understand being in denial about inarguable, significant conveniences offered by the platform.
> What’s so great about New Thing? It’s just Existing Technology but with a Small Improvement.
This is exemplified in the best HN comment of all time where someone showed their new product called “Dropbox” and this dude was like “but I can get the same with FTPFS and versioning with a version control system”.
Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.
Clearly this was my intent, and I'm glad you appreciate the intelligence of my remarks.
The substance of my argument isn't to point out that WinAmp should have a 50 billion dollar market cap instead of Spotify. It's an observation that the trends in our industry are disappointing because they favor lock-in, simple interfaces for non-power users, monopoly, and consolidation.
You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.
A hypothetical "good" company could provide much more than what Spotify does and in the same breath not monopolize all the podcasters or prevent data export. But why do that when you can capture 90% of the market, hold them completely captive, and not do these things which take effort or risk your stranglehold?
I dislike the future we found ourselves in. There was a lot of promise, I suppose wholly imagined, that never panned out.
I'm angry because I imagine better. This shit sucks.
I really doubt the anemic social sharing they offer is all that compelling to that many people. Sure, it has its uses, but if did nothing else, I doubt it would see much use. What's extremely, extremely compelling to me personally, though, is that for the price of half a CD a month, I get access to almost everything I'd ever want to listen to, on all my devices, everywhere, without any friction whatsoever. Even if I really wanted, I could never replicate that with Winamp on my own.
As to the rest for your argument, I'm basically with you and I think you have an important point, I guess you've just made it in a needlessly incendiary way. There are many things to be said in favor of capitalism, but I'm severely disillusioned with the way the currently-favored brand of capitalism is shaping out on the internet and in computing in general.
I'm not going to bother explaining why I think either of those services is superior to these handrolled solutions. But fortunately, both have 100 million+ paying users. You can ask one of them why they're foolishly paying for something when a superior alternative exists.
I'm not talking about hand-rolling solutions. WinAmp was just an analogy. An analogy.
Spotify sucks because it's a draconian walled garden. Yes, they have millions of customers. But there are no alternatives. They all want to lock you in. It sucks.
Back in the day, people were building tools left and right that were interoperable. They were writing importers and exporters and playlist managers.
It wasn't just music - there were tools for RSS and everything else you could imagine. It wasn't as "easy" as things are today, but there were so many novel things you could do.
Now it's all shrink-wrapped plastic that's rented to us. And we don't get to change the paint.
The world is less flexible, less free. Want another analogy? Look at modern Reddit and the disappearance of the 3rd party Twitter clients.
We're serfs.
It sucks. I hate it. Period. That's my argument.
I very strongly felt the way you do until a couple years ago when I started following those communities and eventually started hearing non-technical people IRL start asking about how to cut toxic centralized products out of their lives. I think the internet that inspired you is still out there, maybe even the same or bigger in size, it's just harder to see because the larger centralized serf net is so distracting.
The comparison of how we used to do things, to how we do them now are often just a marketing tactic, because old and new are relative regarding value. E.g., an old violin is better.
What's lacking with the new internet is about this and that, or lack of options. So the entirety of the culture is flavored by an oligopoly in their respective market.And Spotify is missing loads of music.
Music needs to change its perspective to a this and that view. Is "this" what you want over "that"? How old or new something is, is irrelevant.
No musician that I know, and I know lots as a lifelong musician, is enthusiastic about Spotify. Most of us feel we just have no choice. Same with Facebook etc. Most people don't even like it.
In twenty years, ML is going to wipe the slate clean.
That's exactly what I mean. There's a change coming that will disrupt everything. Generative music will replace musicians and art will become dirt cheap - effectively valued the same as the memes on Reddit and Twitter. The same thing that happened to photography is coming to music, film, and games.
https://github.com/NVIDIA/mellotron
https://github.com/xushengyuan/FastSing2
https://github.com/jik876/hifi-gan-demo
https://github.com/bshall/VectorQuantizedCPC
And I can keep going. It's such a fertile field.
Vocalists can and will be improved upon, duplicated, and generated. Instruments played to match any style or theme desired. Entire albums generated in seconds. The latent space will yield more than any human could conceive.
Of course artists will still exist, but they'll exist in a space that is much bigger and more complicated than today. The tooling will also help them make more and become more productive.
I think the cheapness of it all will erode copyright. Companies like Spotify will simply be selling bandwidth, which doesn't sound like a profitable venture.
I give it a twenty year time horizon to be safe, but it'll probably be faster.
Nothing makes me think that the average person would ever choose music they know is generated over another human being creating something they want to create. It will be nothing more than a novelty
Perhaps for some people the process of discovering music, downloading it and storing on their device is super trivial.
Did you know you can only listen 24 hours of music per day and that's only if you don't sleep at all ? You don't need a "massive amount" of music and you never will.
This cracked me up!
Spotify also lets you stream any kind of music, anywhere. It's a nifty feature that some people find useful.
Seriously, arguing over these analogies is like arguing between buying books and a for-profit (albeit digital) library. It says more about the comment that brought up the comparison (in the way that it did, as if they are mutually exclusive) than it does about the two services.
Like you said, it depends on your habits, but there’s no point in arguing, or denying, that Netflix or Spotify do not offer anything more than VLC or WinAmp respectively.
What no one has mentioned is that VLC and WinAmp offer features that the others lack. Somewhere in those features is an argument against vendor lock-in, but that trade-off of features is exactly what revolutionized how most users consume content by default, so I don’t think it’s a very good one.
I recently started buying music again for a few different reasons, but I’ll be damned if I lose the discoverability in Spotify.
That's any kind of music that everyone already listens to and anywhere where you have internet connection.
Spotify is the new radio.
I know people who work for “these orgs” and most (albeit not all) deeply care about music. Some were previously full-time musicians. Many make music as a passion/hobby but never pursued it professionally. Some are ashamed of or uncertain about the impact they’re having on music and the industry. Some seem to genuinely believe they’re helping push music forward. None of them are perfect stewards for music or the music industry, but none are the cold, greedy caricatures you’re imagining. I can only speak for the people I’ve met and they may not be representative, but the bar you set was “nobody” and it’s just not that simple.
The economics of streaming mean that the long-tail just isn't commercially viable. People no longer buy music outright, so that leaves practically no way to make money selling music.
If you deeply care about music, how can you work for an organization that, according to all musicians, is destroying music?
Spotify is doing nothing* to hurt live shows, which have been the primary mode that music was produced, consumed, and made money from for the vast majority of its history.
* well, the existence of easy to consume recordings definitely has an impact on live shows, but I don't think it's that drastic.
Perhaps killing this era of licensed recordings as the main source of income for the music industry is not such a bad thing after all.
As did society, without the idea of e.g. cooked food.
Still, once we get something, we might find it's good for some reasons, and want to keep having it...
Rather than trying to put the genie back in bottle (which I don't see happening), perhaps musicians and songwriters can focus their attention on the practices of the major labels that enable them to extract a huge amount of the revenue the music industry generates, as well as experiment with new income streams (and you still have merch, donations, sponsorships and touring (admittedly difficult right now), avenues that aren't all as available to artists working in different mediums).
It's easier and cheaper, more accessible than ever before to record, mix and put out quality music. Is it harder to make a living off it? Maybe. Would that be solely due to streaming removing income from album sales? Maybe there's also more competition over listeners' dollars these days. And at the end of the day, as a society is the goal to maximize the number of people who can live off their music, or do we have other competing objectives as well?
Sure, there is a greater variety of music than probably ever in the history of humanity.
On the other hand, I think a much smaller proportion of humanity is participating and creating music than ver before - the rise of recorded music has made folklore music all but obsolete - there is essentially no new folk music being produced, maybe for the first time in history.
Of course, Spotify is still driving in this same direction, and maybe it will be even worse.
Bandcamp [0] seems to be doing alright and according to Wikipedia [1] is (barely) in the Alexa top 1000. Not sure how it is for other Genres, but for metal almost every not-big band I find out about is on Bandcamp.
If a band outside the mainstream could live off their music, it was concerts and merch, and that was usually already only for bands at decent labels.
I know and love a band that exists since 1997, not even once were they even thinking about giving up their day jobs.
I don’t like Spotify (I usually listen to specific albums of bands I like), but I feel it’s more of a problem for the middle-class of bands, not the small ones.
I'd say tons of small artists that can't make a living today, could make a living by selling 30-50K records back in the CD/Vinyl days.
There was an explosion of small bands brought on by the internet and cheap digital distribution, but I doubt people started buying more at the same percentage as the amount bands increased.
Not necessarily buying stuff from Bandcamp...
1) they believe your characterization of their impact
2) they believe that your characterization is complete (vs outweighed by some greater good - don’t have anything specific in mind here)
3) good for music = good for musicians = good for the industry
Starting with (1) and (2). Regardless of the merits of your argument it’s hard to talk people out of self-deception that lets them keep their jobs, esteem, etc.
Point (3) is a little more complicated. There’s a lot for reasonable minds to disagree about when defining “good” for musicians, music, or the music industry independently, let alone collectively. There’s a very strong argument that many musicians are currently making less money than they would’ve 20 years ago because of streaming services like Spotify. The argument that Spotify is destroying music itself is significantly weaker and does not necessarily follow from the first. Great music was made long before the modern music industry existed. Great music has been made by people who were not fairly compensated for their work. I want people to be fairly compensated for their work but I can’t definitively tell you it will make music better.
They are catered to investors. The "mass audience" is just a selling point.
Neither investors nor the web/mobile "entrepreneurs" care whether the "audience" is complaining or not, they just care whether the audience is captured. If the audience cannot "leave", if it is made excessively difficult to do so, if there's no other viable alternatives, that's a positive in the eyes of the investor and hence a first priority of every web/mobile "entrepreneur".
<s> Why not support these generous "entrepreneurs". They give away so much "for free". Accept all advertising and tracking. </s>
Spotify's real innovation is not music streaming. That technology is not new in any way. The real innovation is the fact it somehow obtained the licenses necessary to legally stream the music people wanted to listen to.
Finding and downloading mp3's isn't a problem.
Do you really think there's no difference there? If you get a text from a friend saying check out this song and you're out and about on your phone, are you really saying that somehow downloading an mp3 to your phone is as easy as spotify?
It was a brief window. Now their catalogue is so full I doubt anyone could add too much value like that.
He sent me a tshirt, which was kind, but what I remember more is how he responded to recommendations. He's a musician and it was obvious he cared deeply about music. To that point of unhealthy obsession that drives some of us to work at record stores and host radio shows, and others to commit to building a transformative service that helps everyone discover new artists they might like.
You can't help but recognize it if you have it.
You might have a different opinion on the economics of it all, or wish the industry could go a different direction. But if you really talk to these people, there's no doubt they do what they do because they love music.
Compared to traditional music radio, it is more expensive, but vastly more tailored to your own personal tastes (try finding an actual radio station playing prog rock one album at a time...).
I admit I loved both of those things in 1999, but the novelty wore off. Outside of phone cases and laptop stickers, it looks like most people are over skins.
Did Winamp let you stream (almost) any song you wanted?
Or fitness, or messaging, or movies, or TV shows...
Every platform nowadays is a way to lock you in. Strava makes exporting data exceptionally difficult and has API rate-limits. I’m sure there’s a technical reason, but still sucks.
One of the tech journalists I follow has advocated the need for legislation for data portability to avoid shenanigans like Spotify has. Much like the phone number portability in the mid-2000s or interoperability after Ma-Bell AT&T was broken up, it sometimes takes legislation to enforce an open Internet. I think GDPR was one of the first steps towards that.
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216918437-Expor...
I just downloaded all my data and it only took about 5 minutes for them to send me the link. (I have about a year of data.)
What you actually hate, I suspect, is neo-liberal capitalism, not so much the internet itself.
As only the latest in a series of public resources to be surreptitiously privatized, the rules of the internet have started being dictated by investor interests.
For the record, I don't like neo-liberal capitalism much myself, but I just thought it was important to correctly identify the fundamental problem here.
Uhm, no. Could it be that you’re using the free version of Spotify…?
You're probably thinking of autoplay. It's the last option in "settings" on the desktop app.
The spotify handoff is rarely seamless but it usually works well enough.
It’s already decent for chat.
I think it could be a way out of the server/client model that could actually work.
These platforms only care about lock-in. Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.
All of the platforms are catered to mass audiences anyway and suck for power users. They only want to extract money and are doing it the easiest way possible. Customers that don't complain about lack of features.
I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.