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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I fucking hate the modern Internet. Everybody takes and nobody gives. We've regressed from the 90's/00's.

These platforms only care about lock-in. Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.

All of the platforms are catered to mass audiences anyway and suck for power users. They only want to extract money and are doing it the easiest way possible. Customers that don't complain about lack of features.

I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.

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The beauty of this comment is that it's probably serious, but it also perfectly satirizes HN's nostalgia for the 90s internet and software.

We started with Spotify pulling a douchey anticompetitive move, and ended up at

> Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.

Somewhere along the way we've gotten lost. The only convenience of Spotify over Winamp is "social sharing"? Am I taking the bait here or do you actually believe this? How can you believe this?

What about the convenience of being able to play a massive amount of music without having to download and store it on your device? What about facilitating new music discovery? How did you come up with social sharing of all things as the honorable mention Spotify has over Winamp, when the latter is desktop software that requires you to manage all your music on your own?

I can understand if you don't personally value Spotify because you like owning media with no restrictions. But I can't understand being in denial about inarguable, significant conveniences offered by the platform.

Completely agree but you’re missing the one thing that makes it really classic HN.

> What’s so great about New Thing? It’s just Existing Technology but with a Small Improvement.

This is exemplified in the best HN comment of all time where someone showed their new product called “Dropbox” and this dude was like “but I can get the same with FTPFS and versioning with a version control system”.

Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.

> Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.

Clearly this was my intent, and I'm glad you appreciate the intelligence of my remarks.

The substance of my argument isn't to point out that WinAmp should have a 50 billion dollar market cap instead of Spotify. It's an observation that the trends in our industry are disappointing because they favor lock-in, simple interfaces for non-power users, monopoly, and consolidation.

You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.

A hypothetical "good" company could provide much more than what Spotify does and in the same breath not monopolize all the podcasters or prevent data export. But why do that when you can capture 90% of the market, hold them completely captive, and not do these things which take effort or risk your stranglehold?

I dislike the future we found ourselves in. There was a lot of promise, I suppose wholly imagined, that never panned out.

I'm angry because I imagine better. This shit sucks.

> You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.

I really doubt the anemic social sharing they offer is all that compelling to that many people. Sure, it has its uses, but if did nothing else, I doubt it would see much use. What's extremely, extremely compelling to me personally, though, is that for the price of half a CD a month, I get access to almost everything I'd ever want to listen to, on all my devices, everywhere, without any friction whatsoever. Even if I really wanted, I could never replicate that with Winamp on my own.

As to the rest for your argument, I'm basically with you and I think you have an important point, I guess you've just made it in a needlessly incendiary way. There are many things to be said in favor of capitalism, but I'm severely disillusioned with the way the currently-favored brand of capitalism is shaping out on the internet and in computing in general.

Yeah that's fine. I'll take Dropbox and Spotify over "curl + ftpfs + git" and Winamp any day. If that makes me less intelligent than you, that's fine.

I'm not going to bother explaining why I think either of those services is superior to these handrolled solutions. But fortunately, both have 100 million+ paying users. You can ask one of them why they're foolishly paying for something when a superior alternative exists.

I only mentioned intelligence in jest because you did. (It seemed snarky.)

I'm not talking about hand-rolling solutions. WinAmp was just an analogy. An analogy.

Spotify sucks because it's a draconian walled garden. Yes, they have millions of customers. But there are no alternatives. They all want to lock you in. It sucks.

Back in the day, people were building tools left and right that were interoperable. They were writing importers and exporters and playlist managers.

It wasn't just music - there were tools for RSS and everything else you could imagine. It wasn't as "easy" as things are today, but there were so many novel things you could do.

Now it's all shrink-wrapped plastic that's rented to us. And we don't get to change the paint.

The world is less flexible, less free. Want another analogy? Look at modern Reddit and the disappearance of the 3rd party Twitter clients.

We're serfs.

It sucks. I hate it. Period. That's my argument.

It's still possible not to be a serf imo. If you look into self-hosted alternatives to these things the communities online still have a lot of the vibrant and open spirit you're describing, built on collaboration, open protocols, and basic tools.

I very strongly felt the way you do until a couple years ago when I started following those communities and eventually started hearing non-technical people IRL start asking about how to cut toxic centralized products out of their lives. I think the internet that inspired you is still out there, maybe even the same or bigger in size, it's just harder to see because the larger centralized serf net is so distracting.

Sometimes conveniences ruin things. I've heard it said "Having everything feels a lot like having nothing at all."

The comparison of how we used to do things, to how we do them now are often just a marketing tactic, because old and new are relative regarding value. E.g., an old violin is better.

What's lacking with the new internet is about this and that, or lack of options. So the entirety of the culture is flavored by an oligopoly in their respective market.And Spotify is missing loads of music.

Music needs to change its perspective to a this and that view. Is "this" what you want over "that"? How old or new something is, is irrelevant.

No musician that I know, and I know lots as a lifelong musician, is enthusiastic about Spotify. Most of us feel we just have no choice. Same with Facebook etc. Most people don't even like it.

Also, everyone has anxiety and/or depression right now. I’m trying my best to take everything everyone is saying with a grain of salt. Everyone appears to be having a hard time right now.

Thank you, I was shocked by OP saying the only difference between Winamp and Spotify was social sharing...

The only reason that Spotify is a "convenience" is because of the laws that the record companies bought for themselves.

Here's the answer.

In twenty years, ML is going to wipe the slate clean.

What ML even has to do with it? Assuming you mean "Machine Learning".

> What ML even has to do with it? Assuming you mean "Machine Learning".

That's exactly what I mean. There's a change coming that will disrupt everything. Generative music will replace musicians and art will become dirt cheap - effectively valued the same as the memes on Reddit and Twitter. The same thing that happened to photography is coming to music, film, and games.

https://github.com/r9y9/nnsvs

https://github.com/NVIDIA/mellotron

https://github.com/xushengyuan/FastSing2

https://github.com/jik876/hifi-gan-demo

https://github.com/bshall/VectorQuantizedCPC

And I can keep going. It's such a fertile field.

Vocalists can and will be improved upon, duplicated, and generated. Instruments played to match any style or theme desired. Entire albums generated in seconds. The latent space will yield more than any human could conceive.

Of course artists will still exist, but they'll exist in a space that is much bigger and more complicated than today. The tooling will also help them make more and become more productive.

I think the cheapness of it all will erode copyright. Companies like Spotify will simply be selling bandwidth, which doesn't sound like a profitable venture.

I give it a twenty year time horizon to be safe, but it'll probably be faster.

I don't understand, do you think people only care about music? Or do they care about the artist behind the music, seeing them on tour, connecting with them on a human level, etc.

Nothing makes me think that the average person would ever choose music they know is generated over another human being creating something they want to create. It will be nothing more than a novelty

The only ML I can picture wiping away copyright laws is Marxism-Leninism.

> How can you believe this?

Perhaps for some people the process of discovering music, downloading it and storing on their device is super trivial.

Did you know you can only listen 24 hours of music per day and that's only if you don't sleep at all ? You don't need a "massive amount" of music and you never will.

Perhaps the "massive amount" out there is the reason you need the likes of Spotify to consume it in a meaningful way.

Yes definitely this kind of service can be helpful if you don't know what you want to listen to and/or don't know where/how to find new music.

> You don't need a "massive amount" of music and you never will.

This cracked me up!

Perhaps it's the tradeoffs that bother HN. For example, accepting "douchey anticompetitive moves" in exchange for utilising inevitable progress of the internet. One common response could be that the tradeoff isn't worth it; HN would be willing to sacrifice utilising the progress being made in exchange for avoiding the neverending "douchey anticompetitive moves". As I read these "nostalgic" comments, HN is not denying that progress is occurring. HN is questioning whether the tradeoff for utilising the progress, under "douchey anticompetitive" terms, is actually worth it. HN does not long for the level of progress of the 90/00's, it reminisces about the time before every iota of progress was extricably linked to "douchey anticompetitive moves".

> The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.

Spotify also lets you stream any kind of music, anywhere. It's a nifty feature that some people find useful.

And Netflix has nothing over VLC!

It depends on who you are and your habits.

If you never watch or listen to content you don’t want to buy outright or pirate, sure, VLC has nothing over Netflix or, say, YouTube. Especially if you prefer ad-hoc discovery!

Seriously, arguing over these analogies is like arguing between buying books and a for-profit (albeit digital) library. It says more about the comment that brought up the comparison (in the way that it did, as if they are mutually exclusive) than it does about the two services.

Like you said, it depends on your habits, but there’s no point in arguing, or denying, that Netflix or Spotify do not offer anything more than VLC or WinAmp respectively.

What no one has mentioned is that VLC and WinAmp offer features that the others lack. Somewhere in those features is an argument against vendor lock-in, but that trade-off of features is exactly what revolutionized how most users consume content by default, so I don’t think it’s a very good one.

I recently started buying music again for a few different reasons, but I’ll be damned if I lose the discoverability in Spotify.

Yes, freedom of choice is what everyone wants.

> any kind of music, anywhere

That's any kind of music that everyone already listens to and anywhere where you have internet connection.

Spotify is the new radio.

I have most of my library and radios set to auto-download. They download overnight, so I can pretty much always listen to them, regardless of continuous internet connection.

The radio doesn't let me personally select the next song. That's quite the extra functionality there.

Yes, except this time legally...

> I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.

I know people who work for “these orgs” and most (albeit not all) deeply care about music. Some were previously full-time musicians. Many make music as a passion/hobby but never pursued it professionally. Some are ashamed of or uncertain about the impact they’re having on music and the industry. Some seem to genuinely believe they’re helping push music forward. None of them are perfect stewards for music or the music industry, but none are the cold, greedy caricatures you’re imagining. I can only speak for the people I’ve met and they may not be representative, but the bar you set was “nobody” and it’s just not that simple.

That may be true, but every musician/smaller label I come across is saying that Spotify is killing independent music.

The economics of streaming mean that the long-tail just isn't commercially viable. People no longer buy music outright, so that leaves practically no way to make money selling music.

If you deeply care about music, how can you work for an organization that, according to all musicians, is destroying music?

Music has existed for a few thousand years before the idea of selling recordings of it started existing.

Spotify is doing nothing* to hurt live shows, which have been the primary mode that music was produced, consumed, and made money from for the vast majority of its history.

* well, the existence of easy to consume recordings definitely has an impact on live shows, but I don't think it's that drastic.

Perhaps killing this era of licensed recordings as the main source of income for the music industry is not such a bad thing after all.

>Music has existed for a few thousand years before the idea of selling recordings of it started existing.

As did society, without the idea of e.g. cooked food.

Still, once we get something, we might find it's good for some reasons, and want to keep having it...

And now we have vast libraries of music streaming on demand immediately and everywhere. We might also want to keep that (I personally have been using Spotify for over a decade now, and I still think it's amazing compared to what we had before).

Rather than trying to put the genie back in bottle (which I don't see happening), perhaps musicians and songwriters can focus their attention on the practices of the major labels that enable them to extract a huge amount of the revenue the music industry generates, as well as experiment with new income streams (and you still have merch, donations, sponsorships and touring (admittedly difficult right now), avenues that aren't all as available to artists working in different mediums).

It's easier and cheaper, more accessible than ever before to record, mix and put out quality music. Is it harder to make a living off it? Maybe. Would that be solely due to streaming removing income from album sales? Maybe there's also more competition over listeners' dollars these days. And at the end of the day, as a society is the goal to maximize the number of people who can live off their music, or do we have other competing objectives as well?

Is music better off now than 100 years ago?

Sure, there is a greater variety of music than probably ever in the history of humanity.

On the other hand, I think a much smaller proportion of humanity is participating and creating music than ver before - the rise of recorded music has made folklore music all but obsolete - there is essentially no new folk music being produced, maybe for the first time in history.

Of course, Spotify is still driving in this same direction, and maybe it will be even worse.

> People no longer buy music outright

Bandcamp [0] seems to be doing alright and according to Wikipedia [1] is (barely) in the Alexa top 1000. Not sure how it is for other Genres, but for metal almost every not-big band I find out about is on Bandcamp.

[0]: https://bandcamp.com/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp

I try to buy a copy of records I really like off Bandcamp but if you look at the supporters list for even fairly popular albums it's pretty short. Do musicians make enough money off sales on Bandcamp to make a difference? I can't imagine anybody could earn a living at those volumes.

The long tail is indie music. Before Spotify the vast majority of small bands couldn’t make a living off it either.

If a band outside the mainstream could live off their music, it was concerts and merch, and that was usually already only for bands at decent labels.

I know and love a band that exists since 1997, not even once were they even thinking about giving up their day jobs.

I don’t like Spotify (I usually listen to specific albums of bands I like), but I feel it’s more of a problem for the middle-class of bands, not the small ones.

>Before Spotify the vast majority of small bands couldn’t make a living off it either.

I'd say tons of small artists that can't make a living today, could make a living by selling 30-50K records back in the CD/Vinyl days.

The vinyl and early CD days (when there were far fewer small bands) are a long time from Spotify though.

There was an explosion of small bands brought on by the internet and cheap digital distribution, but I doubt people started buying more at the same percentage as the amount bands increased.

The Alexa top 1000 just means people visit Bandcamp (where you can listen to anything for free).

Not necessarily buying stuff from Bandcamp...

You’re presuming a few things:

1) they believe your characterization of their impact

2) they believe that your characterization is complete (vs outweighed by some greater good - don’t have anything specific in mind here)

3) good for music = good for musicians = good for the industry

Starting with (1) and (2). Regardless of the merits of your argument it’s hard to talk people out of self-deception that lets them keep their jobs, esteem, etc.

Point (3) is a little more complicated. There’s a lot for reasonable minds to disagree about when defining “good” for musicians, music, or the music industry independently, let alone collectively. There’s a very strong argument that many musicians are currently making less money than they would’ve 20 years ago because of streaming services like Spotify. The argument that Spotify is destroying music itself is significantly weaker and does not necessarily follow from the first. Great music was made long before the modern music industry existed. Great music has been made by people who were not fairly compensated for their work. I want people to be fairly compensated for their work but I can’t definitively tell you it will make music better.

"All of the platforms are catered to mass audiences anyway and suck for power users."

They are catered to investors. The "mass audience" is just a selling point.

Neither investors nor the web/mobile "entrepreneurs" care whether the "audience" is complaining or not, they just care whether the audience is captured. If the audience cannot "leave", if it is made excessively difficult to do so, if there's no other viable alternatives, that's a positive in the eyes of the investor and hence a first priority of every web/mobile "entrepreneur".

<s> Why not support these generous "entrepreneurs". They give away so much "for free". Accept all advertising and tracking. </s>

The other convenience Spotify over Winamp is that you don’t have to find and download MP3s, you can just type something in and 99% of the time just start playing it immediately...

I am absolutely sure that searching and downloading/streaming music would be a standard feature of every music player out there were it not for copyright.

Spotify's real innovation is not music streaming. That technology is not new in any way. The real innovation is the fact it somehow obtained the licenses necessary to legally stream the music people wanted to listen to.

Which is why the criticism that they “don’t care about music” is so silly- that’s not the thing you make money by caring about. They cared about legal stuff.

And phones don't have Winamp...what is OP expecting people to do, download MP3s on Napster and sync it with iTunes?

Even though it was taken down from the store, you can still sideload a Winamp apk if you really want to

There's also PowerAmp which (iirc?) was a fork from the apk. It's not perfect, but it's better than most players.

Not to mention their recommendations which I find to be quite decent.

I think there's very few people who would fit in to the internet speed range of "capable of streaming music consistently enough to prefer that over downloading" and "downloads slowly".

Finding and downloading mp3's isn't a problem.

If my friend tells me to check out a song or an album, I type in the first word or two of that song or album into spotify and I'm listening to it instantly, whether I'm on my phone or my computer.

Do you really think there's no difference there? If you get a text from a friend saying check out this song and you're out and about on your phone, are you really saying that somehow downloading an mp3 to your phone is as easy as spotify?

It's more than just that. Maintaining your personal catalog of <10,000 songs is halfway doable, but it gets pretty hard after that. Spotify does all that for you and even handles things like making sure "ke$ha" and "kesha" both return the same results.

Napster was pretty close to that

You couldn't play immediately, lots of new releases were fake and artists didn't get anything from it. But that close.

Napster's assets were sold (eventually) to Rapsody, which operated a "Napster" service that was a lot like spotify.

I had a college radio show when Pandora was starting, and had shockingly responsive conversations with Tim W. about up and coming artists he should include.

It was a brief window. Now their catalogue is so full I doubt anyone could add too much value like that.

He sent me a tshirt, which was kind, but what I remember more is how he responded to recommendations. He's a musician and it was obvious he cared deeply about music. To that point of unhealthy obsession that drives some of us to work at record stores and host radio shows, and others to commit to building a transformative service that helps everyone discover new artists they might like.

You can't help but recognize it if you have it.

You might have a different opinion on the economics of it all, or wish the industry could go a different direction. But if you really talk to these people, there's no doubt they do what they do because they love music.

Winamp had much better skins than Spotify, and great visualizations (which seem to have disappeared as a feature in the modern audio world). But Spotify does make it convenient to have a portable library that doesn't need backing up. I hate the lock in (unable to export playlists), I hate the inflexibility of their apps, and I hate that they can exercise both financial and editorial control over music and podcasts. Things are going in a direction where I'll ultimately miss Winamp and the 'old days of Internet freedom'. But the problem is that right now, Spotify is convenient-enough that we will continue the march away from the free Internet. We will keep marching until we hate Spotify, but there's little to stop us along the way until it is too late.

It's probably much better if you think of Spotify as an evolution of music radio, not as an evolution of a music library.

Compared to traditional music radio, it is more expensive, but vastly more tailored to your own personal tastes (try finding an actual radio station playing prog rock one album at a time...).

> Winamp had much better skins than Spotify, and great visualizations

I admit I loved both of those things in 1999, but the novelty wore off. Outside of phone cases and laptop stickers, it looks like most people are over skins.

> Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.

Did Winamp let you stream (almost) any song you wanted?

> I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.

Or fitness, or messaging, or movies, or TV shows...

Every platform nowadays is a way to lock you in. Strava makes exporting data exceptionally difficult and has API rate-limits. I’m sure there’s a technical reason, but still sucks.

One of the tech journalists I follow has advocated the need for legislation for data portability to avoid shenanigans like Spotify has. Much like the phone number portability in the mid-2000s or interoperability after Ma-Bell AT&T was broken up, it sometimes takes legislation to enforce an open Internet. I think GDPR was one of the first steps towards that.

I don't know when the last time you checked was, but downloading your data from Strava is very easy.

https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216918437-Expor...

I just downloaded all my data and it only took about 5 minutes for them to send me the link. (I have about a year of data.)

Oh nice! I haven’t tried to in a while, and have only seen it recently with services that connect to Strava.

> They only want to extract money and are doing it the easiest way possible.

What you actually hate, I suspect, is neo-liberal capitalism, not so much the internet itself.

As only the latest in a series of public resources to be surreptitiously privatized, the rules of the internet have started being dictated by investor interests.

For the record, I don't like neo-liberal capitalism much myself, but I just thought it was important to correctly identify the fundamental problem here.

Winamp has way better user experience so if you do not need social features it is huge let down. Spotify app UX is so terrible. It is super hard to open play queue. Play queue is being filled with random stuff and there is no way to clear it. The only use case which works is random play of whatever spotify wants you to listen.

“Play queue is being filled with random stuff and there is no way to clear it.”

Uhm, no. Could it be that you’re using the free version of Spotify…?

> Play queue is being filled with random stuff and there is no way to clear it.

You're probably thinking of autoplay. It's the last option in "settings" on the desktop app.

I loved Winamp for many reasons, but the multi-device sync is really not there.

The spotify handoff is rarely seamless but it usually works well enough.

I have my hopes on Urbit, they’ve been quietly making progress and the potential seems huge.

It’s already decent for chat.

I think it could be a way out of the server/client model that could actually work.

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