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Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

engineering.atspotify.com

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Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#31

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

CharlesW wrote: post #18
Chilinot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Music is just so increadibly bad UX wise. I have a real hard time justifying paying for it and have considered many times to switch back to Spotify. Trying to find new and interesting music is pretty much impossible outside of the "here's what people listen to now" playlists. You need to know what to look for when searching for things. Spotify was great for finding indie music bands, and could really give good…

> Apple Music is just so increadibly bad UX wise. Is it? When I switched to Apple Music I didn't find it remarkably better or worse then anything else I've used (including Spotify). Reviews ( https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-music ) don't mention any UX issues either. If you know of any substantive commentary on this I'd appreciate a link.

It is. In my personal experience:

- On Mac, Apple Music will just consistently stop playing audio. Force quitting & restarting fixes it.

- On iOS, the app is prone to crashing more than any iOS app I've seen. It's not horrible (I very rarely see crashing period), but it's far more than 3rd party apps or even Apple's own set.

- On iOS and on a weak connection, Music will not play even if it is downloaded. I suspect it has something to do with DRM servers, but don't know for sure.

- I once changed my iCloud password on my account, and it sent the Apple Music app into an infinite loop of trying to reload content, instead of just prompting for my password again.

- Load times are horrendous for online content, even on fiber connections.

- I don't have many complaints about discoverability, but it's certainly nowhere near Spotify's recommendation engine. Spotify's weekly-updated new music playlist is way more relevant to me than Apple Music's version (New Music Mix).

But...

- I think way more people can tell the difference between Spotify's audio quality and Apple Music's Lossless/Atmos. I sure could, and it was obvious.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#32

Post by dotnet00 »

Over the past year I've taken to just buying my music and using plex/plexamp for the streaming convenience. I'd have a hard time going back to other streaming services after getting used to the convenience of having control over the entire chain. Buying music also serves as a nice way to spend digital credit from Amazon.

It ends up costing me about as much as streaming.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#33

Post by myself248 »

toastal wrote: post #29

Just a reminder that downloaded audio files work offline, can have very high or lossless quality not restricted by bandwidth, have a concept of ‘ownership’ with no DRM, don’t have ads or tries to sell your data (though voluntarily contributing to ListenBrainz is admirable), don’t require a monthly fee, and if bought legally gives a bigger slice of the money pie to artists. Also podcasts are just RSS audio.

Got a favorite source for same? I'm bewildered by too many options and not enough comparisons.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#34

Post by mcfedr »

wwweston wrote: post #12
jmacd wrote: post #3

Just here to share that if you haven't tried Apple Music for its lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality then you really, really, should. Apple Music does not have a great UI but it is definitely worth the trade off. Tidal sounds great, but they make you pay extra for lossless and have a smaller catalogue.

Reminder that Apple pays artists better too (average penny per stream over Spotify's average 3-4 tenths of a penny per stream). And that Spotify is led by people who think artists who want that level of compensation are "entitled": https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

Cause they can manipulate the market and don't have to give 30% of their income to an unchecked monopoly

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#35

Post by dastbe »

Does anyone have more context on why “unable to retrieve their xDS configurations.” led to ” Traffic Director-managed clients deprogrammed as the configuration was removed” ? For example, Envoy will keep its configuration forever unless 1) the configuration has a ttl or 2) the server itself sent back empty results. Was it the case that TD config uses ttls, the server was actually sending back empty results (frightening), or is this a behavior specific to grpc?

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#36

Post by acdha »

charcircuit wrote: post #27
politelemon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is now 'par for the course' with GCP. A recent example, Firefox's Jan 2022 outage was due to an unannounced change deployed by GCP to their load balancers. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/02/retrospective-and-technica... I've read several GCP related stories over the years so my opinion of them has fallen quite a bit. For some reason GCP does not get the flak they deserve, and their role in outages tend to be dow…

>unannounced change deployed by GCP to their load balancers Google doesn't need to announce every change they make. It was Firefox's fault for not supporting the protocol correctly.

Most outages have more than one cause. It’s true that Firefox had a nasty bug but it’s also likely that they’d have resolved the problem faster had a clear notification that GCP had upgraded their infrastructure right before the outage started, especially if that had an easy rollback option.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#37

Post by dijit »

mardifoufs wrote: post #26
wwweston wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that Apple pays artists better too (average penny per stream over Spotify's average 3-4 tenths of a penny per stream). And that Spotify is led by people who think artists who want that level of compensation are "entitled": https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

But its not like Spotify is making billions off the artists. They barely break even. Their margins are very very tiny in the first place. Obviously Apple can afford to pay a lot lot more. Now obviously you can say that if they can't afford it they shouldn't be in business, but you can say the exact same for the record labels/artists. They can just pull their songs from Spotify.

I think it’s unfair to say they barely break even, if they do then it’s because they’ve decided to spend so much.

Looking externally at the company they’re listed as having 50,000-100,000 employees. That’s a lot of people to employ for a audio streaming service.

I also happen to know their cloud commitments (I know a guy) and they are large enough that it starts to make a lot of sense to invest into physical hardware.

I’m talking so much money per year that it rivals the GDP of some countries.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#38

Post by awild »

jmacd wrote: post #3

Just here to share that if you haven't tried Apple Music for its lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality then you really, really, should. Apple Music does not have a great UI but it is definitely worth the trade off. Tidal sounds great, but they make you pay extra for lossless and have a smaller catalogue.

The android app of apple music is terrible though. I've tried using it for a month but had constant trouble with it getting stuck loading searches or artists. I've switched to tidal a few days ago, and that seems to have odd issues with buffering (despite having stable 6MB/s downloads with steam).

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#39

Post by criddell »

lelandfe wrote: post #9
jmacd wrote: post #3

Just here to share that if you haven't tried Apple Music for its lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality then you really, really, should. Apple Music does not have a great UI but it is definitely worth the trade off. Tidal sounds great, but they make you pay extra for lossless and have a smaller catalogue.

If you can consistently tell the difference between Spotify Premium's 320kbps and Apple Music's lossless, I am very impressed. Most folks reading this won't be able to. Having used both, I'm now happily paying for Spotify to avoid using the train wreck that is the Apple Music app. It is a true shame what Apple has done to iTunes.

You can definitely hear a difference when the Apple track is using Atmos or spatial audio and your system or headphones support it.

Also, I’m not certain, but I think the tracks that are studio masters are often mixed differently. I’m not sure what it is, maybe greater dynamic range (cd tracks are louder). I think it sounds better.

Even though Apple sounds better, I probably still use Spotify more because the client isn’t as terrible (or at least is terrible in different ways that I’m used to).

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#40

Post by eertami »

wwweston wrote: post #12
jmacd wrote: post #3

Just here to share that if you haven't tried Apple Music for its lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality then you really, really, should. Apple Music does not have a great UI but it is definitely worth the trade off. Tidal sounds great, but they make you pay extra for lossless and have a smaller catalogue.

Reminder that Apple pays artists better too (average penny per stream over Spotify's average 3-4 tenths of a penny per stream). And that Spotify is led by people who think artists who want that level of compensation are "entitled": https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

I don't believe Apple pays better out of the goodness of their own hearts. It seems much more likely that they pay more because that's what they need to pay to get artists on to their platform.

Apple posted profits of $34.6 billion last quarter. Use whatever service is most convenient for you, but I take umbrage with trying to paint a trillion dollar corporation as altruistic for paying a penny per stream to a musician.

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