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Spotify Form F-1

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Re: Spotify Form F-1

#361
post #96

Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - tha…

The client was native (qt) a few years back. I used a very old celeron laptop back then as a dedicated Spotify station, and after they switched to this chromium bs the machine just couldn't handle it anymore.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#362
post #96

Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - tha…

I get the Electron hate but it seems it's a two part problem.

1) Electron needs to be good about sharing memory between multiple electron processes. If I have Slack, VSCode and spotify open, then memory shouldn't be tripled.

2) Better app development. It is quite possible to make performant electron apps. Apart from the memory hit of spinning up blink, if you manage your views and JS well, both memory and CPU usage can be quite reasonable.

3) I really do like Electron apps because it's a very consistent experience, no matter the platform. Developing for Mac or Linux is not an after-thought. It's always in Parity. I can see how that is both a great user experience and makes great business sense. There is a reason why React Native is gaining so much popularity: Consistent experience, write once, deploy everywhere, much smaller and maintainable codebase.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#363
post #96

Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - tha…

Microsoft proved that you can use Electron to make great and optimized applications that perform very well in Visual Studio Code. I have no big issues with the desktop Spotify app. I find it better than iTunes. It's the Android app that Spotify need to fix.

iTunes takes Gigabytes of memory and takes seconds to spin up. I have no idea why a native music app developed for their own platform can be such a piece of stinking garbage. Get your shit together Apple!

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#364
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrote a "persuasive speech" in college a decade ago about how to solve the problem the music industry was facing (piracy). I proposed an all you can listen subscription service, at a price point of say $10. Saying the record labels would work together to make this happen. My professor nearly laughed me out of the room when I proposed my thesis for the speech. I presented the speech anyways and got an A. Today, Spotif…

Could you link the paper? Reading a future prediction/expectation with such accuracy should be interesting.

Hey sorry I just saw this reply. Unfortunately, I can't find the paper, as it was written in word and pre-dates my days of using Dropbox (edit: it pre-dates Dropbox period). However, I was able to find the email thread with my professor, since Gmail is forever. I had to redact some personal information.

https://imgur.com/UeSzTal

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#365

I will never forgive the computing world for abandoning files in favor of streaming. We've gone from digital citizenship to digital serfdom...

No, we've simply gone from primarily direct purchase to primarily a subscription model, which is common in a lot of other markets. And nobody has actually abandoned local files, you can buy and download more music than ever before, and own it forever (if you have backups).

You have to go to boutique retailers to get files that are anywhere near the quality of commercially-available CDs. And while subscription models may be common that doesn't make them pro-consumer, the right thing to do, or even a good idea.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.

Fun fact: bluetooth audio is not lossless (best case is 264kbps AAC, which is unlikely to be better than Spotify's 320 kbps Vorbis), so that's pretty much a moot point.

Sennheiser's 2.4ghz wireless seems to be, best I can tell

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.

How do you hook up wireless headphones to an amp?

PC <- USB Amp <- Headphone Base station

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.

It's not lossless, you're right. I'm an audiophile too (E10K driving DT770s) and I've never done any A/B testing between a Spotify track and a FLAC equivalent. I'm curious how much the difference is.

It's really easy to spot with classical music (muddy bass and treble) or tracks with really shimmery high-end (like lots of hats and cymbals). Basically anything that stresses the encoder

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Levine has written about the Spotify direct listing in a few of his Money Stuff columns. Overall he seems to think it will be a really interesting experiment given that no one is sure how it will play out. Another point he makes is that Spotify is still paying investment bankers a bunch of money despite the fact that it is not IPO-ing. Even when you try to avoid paying bankers a bunch of money by skipping the IP…

Is this the link? https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-21/your-ipo-...

That is one. Here are a couple others:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-20/trading-i...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-04/spotify-s...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-w...

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we've simply gone from primarily direct purchase to primarily a subscription model, which is common in a lot of other markets. And nobody has actually abandoned local files, you can buy and download more music than ever before, and own it forever (if you have backups).

You have to go to boutique retailers to get files that are anywhere near the quality of commercially-available CDs. And while subscription models may be common that doesn't make them pro-consumer, the right thing to do, or even a good idea.

Bandcamp is pretty big nowadays, but it could still be considered a boutique retailer when it comes to pop music. It depends a lot on the genres you prefer. No matter what audiophiles claim, 320kbps MP3/AAC/Ogg/etc. files are equivalent audible quality to CDs, and that's what most online music stores sell.

Subscriptions have existed for hundreds of years, for anything from newspapers to soap. Priced correctly, subscriptions are perfectly fine. You pay a recurring fee for a service, and in return you don't have to worry about logistics or storage.

A subscription model could even work perfectly fine for cars (and does, in many cities), as long as it's correctly managed and fairly priced. Pay a set monthly fee, and you get access to a range of cars, parked in a central location near where you live. You don't have to worry about maintenance or depreciation, the car sharing company handles all of that. In return, the monthly rate is lower than what most people would pay to actually own and maintain a car of their own. It works because the costs are shared across a lot more people.

I know a lot of people prefer to own stuff, and I get it in a lot of cases, especially when you know you'll need the item in question for a long time, need to modify or otherwise do something that's outside of a normal use case. On the other hand, I think this race towards owning as much stuff as possible is driving western society to destruction.

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