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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

#91

Post by wwweston »

nemothekid wrote: post #70
wwweston wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poo…

> I think Napster/Limewire/Kazaa were far greater influences on price point expectations for Music.

Unauthorized copies have been a fact of life not only through the dawn of the P2P era but back through the cassette era. And you don't even have to get into the ethics of that in order to understand that none of them ever set price point expectations. Everyone involved in that activity ultimately understood that they were not participating in economically supporting the artist (or indeed, in any economic transaction at all). Everyone was clear on the accounting.

Spotify adopted an economic model marginally different from piracy but with the veneer of a legitimate economic transaction, the pretense of some kind of proper accounting.

So yeah. It absolutely did more to set price point expectations.

> Rdio and Grooveshark

Rdio and Grooveshark are weird examples to pull in, Rdio because it was always too late and too small to have really made that much of a difference, Grooveshark because it started life as more of a P2P tool. What's next, pointing out the missed relevance of audioscrobbler/last.fm?

> There is no way you could have pulled that off in 2008, and the reason for that was piracy.

The primary reason you couldn't have pulled that off in 2008 was economic contraction, not piracy.

If you actually look at the RIAA sales history figures you can see it:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

The total sales volume peaks quite clearly coincide more with macroeconomic trends than technical trends. CDs get huge during the "irrational exuberance" of the 90s. It dips with the dot-com crash, but even with P2P taking off like crazy and digital retail barely getting off the ground, the amount of money going into CDs is more flat than downward ... until 2007, of course, and everyone knows what happened then. And the recent primary huge revenue growth in streaming has coincided with periods of big economic growth.

And you can also see the story in there of digital retail growth from 2004... up until streaming cannibalized that.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#92

Post by DougMellon »

parkerduckworth wrote: post #62
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?

https://roonlabs.com/

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#93

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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.

> It ends up costing me about as much as streaming.

Spotify is $10/month. If you're purchasing everything instead, that's only about 1 new album or 10 tracks per month into your collection.

The only way the price could be similar is if you're not listening to much new music. That may work from some people, but I don't think it's common. I estimate I listen to a minimum of 50 new tracks per week, which would be hundreds of dollars per month if I was buying everything.

I also wouldn't be exposed to nearly as much new music if I had to buy it all.

> 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.

I'm also confused about how dealing with all of these small purchases, manually managing your library, and setting up and maintaining a server for it is more convenient than signing up for Spotify.

It's hard to beat something like Spotify for convenience: Create account. Add payment method. Listen to nearly anything.

I think you might be dismissing the relative complexity of your setup because it's something you enjoy setting up and maintaining, but it's definitely not as convenient as Spotify (or other music streaming services).

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#94

Post by DougMellon »

jmcphers wrote: post #52
myself248 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get my music on Bandcamp, if the artist sells it there. They compensate artists far better than Spotify[1], and offer lossless, DRM-free downloads. Some major labels don't sell on Bandcamp; for those I often buy the MP3s on Amazon. I don't love Amazon, but they do sell high quality, DRM-free music now. [1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

I would also recommend checking Qobuz which is where I find most of my larger label FLAC files.

https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#95

Post by benatkin »

superjan wrote: post #11
hericium wrote: post #2

> On March 8, Google Cloud Traffic Director experienced an outage. This in coordination with a bug in a client (gRPC) library caused the Spotify outage that affected many of our users: if you were logged out of a Spotify app, you were unable to log back in.

But they don’t explain why I was logged out. I did not log out myself. Or is this “logged out” in the sense that I did not have their app active at the time of the disruption?

Logging out on a 401 is pretty common in authentication, because it gives the user an opportunity to sign in again. Maybe the problem resulted in a 401 being returned, when it would have been better to return a 500.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#96

Post by DougMellon »

ge96 wrote: post #7
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.

> lossless and Dolby Atmos sound quality General headphone recommendation? Best I have is an MDR-7506 but I don't think it's meant for listening rather producing.

I currently own the Sennheiser hd 650's[1] with a Schiit amp[2] and absolutely love the combo. I also have them on a harman curve. You can get the HD 6xx from Massdrop for cheaper and it's the exact same driver[3]. My partner uses the Sennheiser 58x's[4] as well as she doesn't like to use an amp and they are probably the greatest bang for your buck I've come across.

[1] https://en-us.sennheiser.com/high-quality-headphones-around-...

[2]https://www.schiit.com/products/magni-1

[3]https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-sennheiser-hd6xx

[4]https://drop.com/buy/massdrop-x-sennheiser-hd-58x-jubilee-he...

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#97

Post by luhn »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23
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…

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...

Worth noting that Snap also has a commitment with AWS, they are not exclusively running on GCP.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#98

Post by dotnet00 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #93
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.

> It ends up costing me about as much as streaming. Spotify is $10/month. If you're purchasing everything instead, that's only about 1 new album or 10 tracks per month into your collection. The only way the price could be similar is if you're not listening to much new music. That may work from some people, but I don't think it's common. I estimate I listen to a minimum of 50 new tracks per week, which would be hundre…

> Spotify is $10/month. If you're purchasing everything instead, that's only about 1 new album or 10 tracks per month into your collection.

On average, that is indeed where I'm at, I had thought I did more than that but upon actually checking my purchase history, I found that I didn't really get new tracks too often, instead every few months I come across a new artist (via covers on youtube or from twitter) whose style I really enjoy and end up buying most of their discography in one go (and new tracks don't come out too often). Then I spend a lot of time listening to it all, enjoying picking up things I might've missed before. This is probably also affected by my preferences being a bit niche as a very specific flavor of J-Pop.

For managing the overall structure of my library I use MusicBrainz Picard, the small purchases don't really bother me too much.

You're right in that I do also enjoy setting up and maintaining my configuration. I self-host a bunch of things so the machine is already running anyway.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#99

Post by dvtrn »

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…

What convenience is that

In my particular case, as someone who listens to a lot of international music: licensing. I've come across, and subsequently lost track of so many amazing international groups whose music suddenly comes off of streaming sites and don't come back because of licensing disputes or the license just plain ran out.

Pretty convenient for me now to just buy the song/album, put it on my drive and know it's not going anywhere outside of data loss or drive theft. Two things I can reasonably control with a bit more vigor.

Re: Incident report: Spotify outage on March 8

#100

Post by tjpnz »

Has anyone else noticed that the quality of the Android app has really gone downhill lately? There's often a lag of a few seconds now when switching between tracks and I've noticed an issue recently where the song title/cover art doesn't always update to reflect the currently playing track. Sometimes the play/pause/skip buttons become completely unresponsive.

This doesn't appear to be an issue on my end, I haven't had problems with any of the other streaming apps I use and I've confirmed the same set of issues after a fresh install of the app. For the time being it's more of a nuisance but I would be prepared to consider alternatives if things don't start improving soon.

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