81–90 of 94 posts
It is really hard to compare Napster and Spotify as they are entirely different beasts. Let me just say that I built the Napster server, so I'm biased. I have also been a Spotify user for several years. For me, Spotify is a sub par experience because I don't know what I want and I have different music tastes than my friends. The only thing that makes Spotify useful for me is sites like http://sharemyplaylists.com/ .…
So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan.
I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account.
Nope.
Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital information utopia made possible by the Internet. The paternalistic distribution systems we have now are a mere shadow of what could be without the strangling influence of the media industry.
I disagree with this -- i was a very heavy Napster user in 99 and am a very heavy Spotify user (and, NB, they are a customer) today. Obviously it's a fun angle for a SXSW talk, but: - The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total index…
[1] Although I hate that word.
[2] Daughter - His Young Heart, Japandroids B-sides from the Post-Nothing sessions (Younger Us, Art Czars, and Heavenward Grand Prix), anything from Mirel Wagner or 9mm Parabellum Bullet, anything from The Lonely Forest's first three releases, Gotye - Like Drawing Blood (which is so much better than the album that finally made him famous), etc. Spotify is seriously lacking in terms of selection.
It is really hard to compare Napster and Spotify as they are entirely different beasts. Let me just say that I built the Napster server, so I'm biased. I have also been a Spotify user for several years. For me, Spotify is a sub par experience because I don't know what I want and I have different music tastes than my friends. The only thing that makes Spotify useful for me is sites like http://sharemyplaylists.com/ .…
What was your irc name?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you not used any of the Spotify Apps (e.g. MoodAgent, Last.fm, and, of course, sharemyplaylist)? If not, then I highly recommend you do - be interesting to see if the experience changes your opinion. Seems to me that the Spotify API opens up all sorts of possibilities for music discovery.
I've been using last.fm since it was audioscrobbler. I wrote one of the mac scrobblers years ago to upload my iPod plays. While it is fun to track my analytics, its user recommender is poor at best and the radio, I don't know, it just doesn't match my taste. I use it all the time to find popular songs by artists I've just discovered though. Great for evaluation. Sharemyplaylist.com is basically what makes Spotify use…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note: I built and ran the Napster server. I just want to say: thank you for building one of the most important inventions of our time. (Napster kickstarted the information sharing revolution.)
Usenet might wish to contest that claim :)
That said, Napster made it all really easy. They also came along when CD drives were finally commonplace, and Winamp had seeded the ground by having people build up a library of MP3s beforehand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woah, you wrote the server for Napster?! That's awesome! Can you talk about that a bit? What was the underlying algorithm, what was the stack and how much data were you pushing at your max?
Which underlying algorithm? The search engine was built on a ternary tree with a custom merging algorithm. I honestly don't know if the merging algorithm has a name as it was something I came up with (literally) while sleeping one night. Because we mostly used ID3 tags and file names, it was completely unnecessary to use a stemming algorithm because if you typed in a misspelled search, given the size of our index, th…
"...it was completely unnecessary to use a stemming algorithm because if you typed in a misspelled search, given the size of our index, there was probably someone who tagged their file using the same misspelling."
For me the coolest thing about Napster was all the remixes people were making. You could search for "[anything] remix" (e.g. Tetris remix, Nintendo remix, Sesame Street remix, ...) and find something awesome that would never see the light of day in a label. Some of those remixes bled through into the later P2P systems. Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital informa…
I disagree with this -- i was a very heavy Napster user in 99 and am a very heavy Spotify user (and, NB, they are a customer) today. Obviously it's a fun angle for a SXSW talk, but: - The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total index…
You may be a heavy user where "heavy" equals "frequent," but I don't think you're a heavy user where "heavy" equals "eclectic"[1]. Otherwise you'd have experienced firsthand just how useless Spotify is for music outside the mainstream, even (in contrast to what Aloisius said) when you already know exactly what you're looking for. In just the last few days there've been at least half a dozen[2] times when I wanted to…