Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

engineering.atspotify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#61

Post by paeex »

chx wrote: post #57
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.

Not to mention you are not financing spreading lies about covid...

Are there alternatives to Spotify that can only provide me the right information so that I don't have to think by myself?

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#62

Post by parkerduckworth »

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.

Anyone know of a self hosted audio streaming service that works reasonably well?

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#63

Post by smoe »

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.

Depends on your listening habits. If you listen to a few albums a lot, buying the albums absolutely makes sense to make sure you'll always have them.

But for example me, I grew up listing to mixtapes and as a child/teenager spent many weekends in front of my sisters programmable 5 disc CD player to record songs from CDs borrowed from friends to cassette tapes. I never got out of this habit. While some albums I prefer to listen as a whole, in general I favor playlists. Streaming is great for this. Also especially YouTube has a lot of live recordings that aren't released otherwise.

I do buy quite a bit of digital and physical records from independent artist but then listen to them on Spotify. Because the streaming platforms tend to have horrible payment models. This I find much worse, than DRM and lack of ownership.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#64

Post by justinhj »

belval wrote: post #46
dotnet00 wrote: post #32

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.

> getting used to the convenience of having control over the entire chain What convenience is that? How do you consider that your setup is in anyway more convenient that opening the Spotify app and listening to basically anything? If you are into very niche music or something maybe, but it's pretty hard to beat just clicking "play". Now if you said you simply pirate the songs I could see the convenience of saving mon…

Because of outages and or censorship of content

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#65

Post by alar44 »

dotnet00 wrote: post #32

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.

I have issues with Plex regularly with file formats not playing nice, incorrect box art, content being labeled completely wrong, and random server hangs. It's OK, but I wouldn't say it's more convenient than Spotify. With Spotify I do literally nothing. With Plex I have to troubleshoot now and then. I don't see how self hosting a media collection is more convenient in any way.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#66

Post by trutannus »

w4rh4wk5 wrote: post #60

The main problem of the outage was that users were logged out and thus unable to play what songs they had downloaded / cached.

That and the accounts appearing locked, with password reset links not working. For the first few minutes of the outage, I thought I my accounts were what was compromised. Caused genuine concern for a while there since it appeared I had lost control over my Spotify account, and there's credit card data in there.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#67

Post by alar44 »

justinhj wrote: post #64
belval wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> getting used to the convenience of having control over the entire chain What convenience is that? How do you consider that your setup is in anyway more convenient that opening the Spotify app and listening to basically anything? If you are into very niche music or something maybe, but it's pretty hard to beat just clicking "play". Now if you said you simply pirate the songs I could see the convenience of saving mon…

Because of outages and or censorship of content

I've never experienced a Spotify outage in the 5 years I've been using it and I use it daily. Not once.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#68

Post by MetricExpansion »

politelemon wrote: post #56
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t get flak because most folks are in AWS or Azure. You notice when AWS or Azure hiccups because of this. GCP, not so much (besides Spotify and Snap, although I believe Snap’s 5yr $2B GCP commit deal recently ended). https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud https://thenewstack.io/long-running-study-finds-uptake-of-pr...

Ah, good point about higher usage therefore flak, I hadn't considered that. Thanks.

Bjarne Stroustrup’s classic quote “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses” certainly applies here.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#69

Post by rightbyte »

hk__2 wrote: post #43
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.

According to Last.fm I’ve listened to 156k songs from 16k artists (35k albums) over a little less than 10 years. Last time I bought music it was on iTunes and the lowest price was €0.79 per song. That would be a total of €123k. Over the same period, I gave exactly €1200.93 to Spotify [1]. [1] note: it’s a pure coincidence that this is ~ €10 * 12 months * 10 years; the price has not always been the same.

How do you find so many different songs? Shuffle?

You are essentially listening to 40 new songs per day.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#70

Post by nemothekid »

wwweston wrote: post #42
mardifoufs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Labels are their own problem for sure, and Apple has advantages over Spotify (I'd guess they mostly come from the fact that Apple can run its digital distribution infrastructure at a profit even without music altogether). I don't have any sympathy for Spotify, though. No one has done more than they have to create the price point expectations for products like theirs. They should have known it wasn't enough. They prob…

>No one has done more than they have to create the price point expectations for products like theirs.

I think Napster/Limewire/Kazaa were far greater influences on price point expectations for Music. This reads like complete erasure of music distribution from 1999-2011. Not to mention you already have companies like Rdio and Grooveshark that were pretty much squeezed to death by the labels.

Yes, Advertising is a poor way to monetize such a service (just look at Pandora), but Apple is in a privileged position being able to start today with a subscription only service; one that is enforced by their market position in devices. There is no way you could have pulled that off in 2008, and the reason for that was piracy.

Post reply on HN