Winamp didn't stream all music in existence over the internet. How is it really comparable?
And nothing else related to the functional differences between Spotify and WinAMP can explain why Spotify is slow. Done properly, it should feel snappier than WinAMP felt in 2000.
On that level, Winamp did the job just fine.
If we're trading music player performance for the massive increase in availability I'll make that trade.
But really, 99% of the value-add of Spotify over Winamp is stuff that happens server-side. Your Spotify client doesn’t have a database of all the songs, nor the ML models for computing recommendations. As far as playing streaming music goes, Winamp would happily play an m3u (mmmm soma.fm).
Don’t get me wrong, the discovery and search features in Spotify have brought me a ton of value. But wow is the client resource usage dramatically disproportionate for the added functionality
This is actually a point in favor of directly comparing WinAMP and Spotify - the important "value-add" bits of Spotify all happen server side, so they should have exactly zero impact on client performance.
And it was almost instant.