Spotify’s Beta Used ‘Pirate’ MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
If this is indeed the case, they can stream music to everyone's phones / computers, then use their network to stream to their other customers. It's truly brilliant, and saves them tons on network costs. At the same time, it is somewhat disingenuous to me - hence I'll never go back.
It's not at all surprising that their initial "success" is tied to torrenting as well.
EDIT: Yes I know they supposidly stopped this program [1]. I still thought I should share it, as many people don't/didn't know (and it is relevant to the article).
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
For those who didn't use Skype at the time, they had an algorithm which would promote some nodes to "super node" status. Those nodes would then be used for processing power, uploads, etc.
I guess Microsoft didn't like the possible legal implications and this "feature" went on the chopping block quite early after the acquisition (unless my memory's failing me and Skype dumped it even before the acquisition).
* The nefariousness one: So Microsoft can let NSA and the cops listen in.
* Because mobile clients don't work well with P2P.
* Because servers and bandwidth got really cheap.
"An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Joltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that provides users throughout the world with free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however"[0]
[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/new-lawsuit-brings-clarity...
Yet, dissonantly enough, this is exactly the model you accept if you use proprietary drivers on your system. Arguably, it's the model you accept if you use any proprietary software - programs are not perfectly isolated from each other.
If you found this revelation about Skype to be vaguely shocking, as I did, consider if your reaction is consistent when it comes to the other things in your life - like your Android phone.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/skype-ditched-peer-to-peer-supe...
> ...the Skype peer-to-peer network architecture elected certain nodes to be "supernodes", to help maintain the index of peers as well as handle parts of the NAT [network address translation]/firewall traversal for other peers. This election algorithm chose only machines with open Internet connectivity, substantial uptime, and which were running the latest version of our peer-to-peer code.
I probably misunderstood the first part of his comment to mean that they also wanted to distribute some of their processing to clients.
Two founders of Spotify came from uTorrent after the sale.[1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus
Ludvig is a badass. He's been one of my favorite programmers since the early uTorrent days. That's why Spotify was such a good product back in beta, he basically had control over everything technical.
Thus the P2P approach to bootstrap their service (I didn't mind. It was actually a pretty cool solution to an engineering problem) and the use of pirated media to test the product. Ludvig helped create Spotify in an attempt to turn his love for P2P into an actual commercial product.
Of course, Spotify sucks now and BitTorrent has mutilated uTorrent. I hope he leaves Spotify and starts a new project.
Spotify is awesome and convenient. In comparison to other services, for me as a user, it's a clear winner.
I was one of the first users of the beta program. At the time, Ludvig's philosophy of simplicity + hidden functionality via interactive views shone through the UI and it was very pleasant to use. The 5 star rating system was the icing on the cake. A step down in functionality from Amarok's playlist creation system, and lacking the fine search and organization capabilities of foobar2000, but it did the job.
However, the UX of Spotify has hideously morphed over time. Now the UI mostly uses Chromium Embedded Framework which brings huge overhead and causes lots of rendering latency. The font size and padding has grown, then shrunk, then grown again, each time showing less tracks on a page at once. Views that were once interactive with left and right clicks became static. Star ratings turned into Like/Unlike.
Their user behavior tracking has naturally been cranked up to 11, though it is better than a lot of similar products, I still have no desire for a music service to track anything other than the music I search and play. Even tracking the song titles in my personal library is an unacceptable breach of privacy.
The slow and steady social creep and tracking through Facebook is also unacceptable.
It doesn't utilize P2P anymore, which I considered a plus because I love supporting and legitimizing P2P tech.
It has become less of an engineer-led company and more of a traditional company with shareholder interests
I could really go on. The downsides of Spotify as a music player are much greater than they were at product launch.
The most infuriating thing about it is that Spotify never fielded these changes with users before committing to them, and each and every time when a simple addition to the settings panel could make the changes optional, they were instead forced upon us.
I don't like a music player that frequently changes its UI without my approval. I like a music player that puts me in charge of the UI.
I no longer pay for Spotify and have returned to getting my music through other means.
On my Linux and Windows machines, I mostly use foobar2000 and VLC, and Amarok when I need powerful playlisting tools. If Radionomy ever gets their shit straight with Winamp (They bought it from AOL in '14 and have to clean out all proprietary code) then I will definitely consider going back.
Give me a streaming service that doesn't spy on me unnecessarily and has an API so that I can implement a plugin to my favorite existing media player or otherwise an absolutely beautiful and immutable interface, and of course a large library and doesn't shaft its artists, and I will pay for it. Anything less than that, in 2017, sucks.
Actually it's mentioned in the article itself: "The technology deployed by Spotify was also familiar. Like the majority of ‘pirate’ platforms at the time, Spotify operated a peer-to-peer (P2P) system which grew to become one of the largest on the Internet. It was shut down in 2011."
The date appears to be wrong though, since the other sources (including the linked article) are from 2014.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
So basically, you're saying that since they (according to you) weren't plastering news about their P2P design across all their marketing (as if most people would even be able to understand that, from a marketing perspective), and DESPITE the fact that it was well-known enough for academic papers in 2011 to be written on the design (http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-stats...), that's why you'll never return to them, even though they've since entirely removed that functionality? Because you never heard of that part of the design until you detected it on your own network?
This isn't someone "robbing your bandwidth" IMHO, I'm not for example angry when I torrent something open-source and have it set to reupload 2x what I downloaded... In fact here's Netflix debating going to a P2P design in 2014: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/netfl...
If I torrented for a year ("as a downloader") without realizing how it worked, and then found out it was uploading what I already downloaded, would I have the right to be indignant about my own ignorance?
That said, a lot of new endeavours (especially on the Internet) have questionable legality when they first emerge (mp3 scene, bitcoin, digital content distribution in general, etc) and then acquire legitimacy later on. It's fine (... I guess?) to feel unlimited righteous indignation about a company (I feel that way about Microsoft, actually), but it's not fine IMHO if it's not based on reality.
However, I personally will never use their service again. When they thought it was alright to use my network (that I pay for) to make money, then I have a right to turn my back on them.
Questionable legality is one thing, I personally could care less about laws. I break probably 5 or 6 laws an hour. Laws have nothing to do about morality. It's "illegal" to go 1 mph over the speed limit, it's "illegal" to cross the street without a sign, etc. As a society the vast majority of the laws we don't care about or follow.
What most people do is try to be moral and civil with one another. In the case of distributing music, most people seem willing to pay (hence Spotify has become popular). However, that didn't give them a right to use my network without my consent.
That is immoral, and that will get a visceral reaction from people. In this case, it didn't surprise me they were using torrented content in their service. I shared what I found interesting, and why it didn't surprise me, and also my opinion about how they were shady.
> even though they've since entirely removed that functionality?
If a company is shady, I'm not going to trust them with my money / data unless I have to (i.e. Comcast / Verizon / AT&T). If I have a choice, I'd use someone else. This is my "vote" of dissatisfaction. I vote with my wallet, and I share my insights / knowledge such that others will vote (informed) as well.
I would feel it is justified to be miffed if they tried to do it in secret and it was determined that they did indeed try to hide or downplay this fact, but this is not in fact what happened. Their stance seemed to be "yeah, this is currently how it works, we know some customers are unhappy with the arrangement, so we'll eventually change it, but you can't currently turn uploads off." Thus, you are basing your indignation off your own ignorance, and not reality.
Full disclosure: Am long-time Spotify fan (hey, gotta be honest!)
They said nothing but "this is how I felt, this is why I stopped using it". If I had a bad experience with some software, I too would uninstall it, even if I'm told "but you see, you didn't experience it correctly".
It's DRM, data caps and walled gardens that have convinced people otherwise. The next logical step is separating clients and servers altogether. Why should I pay for data if I'm only a consumer? In that case we might as well let youtube and netflix pay to deliver the content. And then it's back to cable TV again.
PS. You also have to remember that Spotify is 10 years old. Internet infrastructure and things like cloud offerings wasn't as good. It wasn't just a move to save bandwidth, but to actually be able to offer a good service (low latency, high throughput, for free). Which still isn't easy.
If I mistakenly believed you killed my mother and shot you in the heat of the moment, would I be entitled to my feeling?
I have been taking part in a one man boycott of Nintendo for over 20 years.
Not that it hurts them. Not that they care. I was just done with them.
I have never been able to forgive the company.
(I was in my early 20's when that came out in the arcades. I remember it well)
Over the years, I have considered buying an old arcade cabinet just to re-experience the magic.
I just need to find the space for it.
I had problems getting it to run under XP, I wonder how well it would work under 7.
If it wasn't on their website designed for selling, then they don't really have an excuse. That is the spot where those kind of details should be mentioned.
I don't know what your standards are here but "an app that both sends and receives data from the Internet" pretty much describes every app in popular existence right now
They are shady, few years ago they forced new users to have a fazebook account in order to sign up. I don't know how it is now, do they still?
I don't read the previous post as complaining about legality, but instead about taking an actin that could cost him as a user either financially (through bandwidth charges) or inconvenience (through reduced bandwidth available to other applications, or getting cut off or speed limited instead of charged for the extra bandwidth which is how some mobile plans work).
https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...
When they opened their high-quality audio service the songs had clear artifacts of having been encoded more than once. If you had access to the original uncompressed audio stream, you'd simply encode a higher quality version. Many albums weren't available for high quality streaming at all.
The logical explanation was they didn't have a database of lossless audio from which to re-encode, and we already knew they were using P2P. Why not use the P2P to raid users music collections as well.
Plus, simpler reversing techniques like strace / Sysmon would have caught this sort of thing.
[0]https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA12381/what-is-the-cloud
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
You could re-sell a one click VPN for revenue.
I'm happy they succeeded. It's an awesome service built by some very skilled hackers. I wish there was a Spotify for movies and TV series too.
"For a company that has attracting pirates built into its DNA, it’s perhaps fitting that it tempted them with the same bait found on pirate sites. Certainly, the company’s history of a pragmatic attitude towards piracy means that few will be shouting ‘hypocrites’ at the streaming platform now."
What is this attitude to piracy that will prevent them from being called hypocrites? I do think that aiming to eliminate piracy while using it is hypocritical.
Unless they needed to use that pirated music to reduce pirated music overall, in which case they did well from a consequentialist standpoint.
To be fair those haven't been issues with digital music purchases for a long time. Buying music couldn't be more convenient these days.
I haven't seen regional releases in ages.
Platform exclusivity? Again, for streaming maybe, but we were talking about purchases, right? I buy my weekly releases in a digital, lossless format from a range of stores. The files I receive are mine. Non of the issues you mentioned apply these days.
Streaming, however, while convenient can have disadvantages like the ones you mentioned. More importantly, you don't own your collection, you just rent the music and albums may disappear at any point.
However none of this justifies piracy since there's a flawless alternative: Buying music.