Because streaming music is a trivial task, computationally-wise. It could have had some performance impact in 2000, but we're in 2021 now.

And nothing else related to the functional differences between Spotify and WinAMP can explain why Spotify is slow. Done properly, it should feel snappier than WinAMP felt in 2000.

It's comparable only on an abstract level - mostly because there's hardly anybody who really wants/needs "all music in existence over the internet", most people just want to "listen to music that I like".

On that level, Winamp did the job just fine.

It really did not for me by that standard. I have access to orders of magnitude more music now that I know I like than I did during the Winamp days and I was a pretty early and savvy user back then so I had more access than a lot of people.

If we're trading music player performance for the massive increase in availability I'll make that trade.

Is that why everyone uses a streaming service and no one collects music any more?

Lol arguably Winamp + Napster did :D

But really, 99% of the value-add of Spotify over Winamp is stuff that happens server-side. Your Spotify client doesn’t have a database of all the songs, nor the ML models for computing recommendations. As far as playing streaming music goes, Winamp would happily play an m3u (mmmm soma.fm).

Don’t get me wrong, the discovery and search features in Spotify have brought me a ton of value. But wow is the client resource usage dramatically disproportionate for the added functionality

And the kicker is, the music client is a completely separate concern from a song database, or a recommendation engine.

This is actually a point in favor of directly comparing WinAMP and Spotify - the important "value-add" bits of Spotify all happen server side, so they should have exactly zero impact on client performance.

It had Shoutcast.

Was Shoutcast all that fast? It didn't seem nearly as rock solid as the rest of winamp but I guess it could have been my internet at the time.

You could go to the shoutcast website, get the shoutcast links for the radios you were interested in, then make a playlist that could be dealt with just like any other playlist.

And it was almost instant.

Yes, it was instant.