How Spotify Works
pansentient.com
pansentient.com
Pareto principle, bang on!
Luckily the windows version works fine under Wine , even though it does nag about "unsupported platform"
In Germany, its only competitor uses an AIR app. Since Spotify is not available in Germany and thus a slight pain to use, I would really like to use an alternative. But AIR vs. Qt... the AIR app does not work on case sensitive file systems (solvable), it does not recognize the Mac media keys, it is sluggish and playback is nowhere near instantaneous. And you have to install AIR and suffer through regular AIR updates and the like. Oh, and audio quality is noticeably worse.
They seem to invest all their effort into the (very good) HTML(5) client and into mobile apps now.
You are paying for music licensing and you get the delivery for free because of the p2p nature of their system. Traditional client-server delivery would've simply translated into higher monthly fees, which I am pretty sure would've not been any more popular among their average user base.
Your upload bandwidth is more limited than down though (although how much does the average user really use upstream anyway?).
It should be easy to use a firewall to throttle the outbound traffic on whatever port spotify uses. Pherhaps you could just block it altogether , does the service still work even if you are not sharing?
I wonder what the legal implications of this are though, could the RIAA or similar at some point decide to start suing individual spotify users for sharing their music even though the record companies have some agreement with spotify in place?
[1] Just need to predict the Internet-facing ports for both peers and then instruct them to connect() towards each other at these ports. The rest is handled natively by TCP, via the simultaneous open scenario [2].
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt, sect. 3.4, fig. 8
Got the answer from the paper: When a client wishes to connect to a peer, a request is also forwarded through the Spotify server asking the connectee to attempt a TCP connection back to the connecter. This means that as long as one of the two peers can accept incoming connections, the connection will succeed.
http://chalmersalumni.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ludvig_str...
That point about doesn't quite make sense. Most of the time on my phone I'm playing from the local cache in off line mode. So it all comes from the servers originally but 98% of it is repeated plays from the local cache.
Source (in Swedish so please use translate): http://jardenberg.se/b/lite-mer-spotify-siffror-hur-99-krono...
There was an interesting breakdown from the CEO of Mog discussed his revenue model on this pretty good Fast Company article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1796382/mog-ceo-on-artist-payment...
"In the music industry, a music publisher (or publishing company) is responsible for ensuring the songwriters and composers receive payment when their compositions are used commercially. Through an agreement called a publishing contract, a songwriter or composer "assigns" the copyright of their composition to a publishing company. In return, the company licenses compositions, helps monitor where compositions are used, collects royalties and distributes them to the composers. They also secure commissions for music and promote existing compositions to recording artists, film and television."[1]
So basically the publisher is getting money (a large portion of it) to make sure they get paid and provide contract negotiations. Spotify can easily (1) ensure the artist gets paid and (2) provide negotiations (you get X for Y amount of plays). The excessive overhead of the middle man is unnecessary now. IMHO, recording labels should just provide artists access to studios/producers/etc and become glorified marketing (music specific) firms. Also it might still be interesting for publishers to collect royalties for things like tv-ads, inclusion to movies, etc. But to the mass public it's a service that's no longer needed.
Lots of business models are built on assumptions. The assumptions have changed.
[1]- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_publisher_(popular_music)
What's to say streaming services wouldn't run up the price on artists once record labels are out of the picture? You could argue that artists could simply take their music to another service but if one service has A LOT of users (ie, Spotify) that might not be a viable option.
I'd rather take a copy of the music, and own the copy the rest of my life, thank you.
Most musicians I know are poor and would make pretty poor business people. Unless spotify or apple decide to go into developing artists themselves.
So I guess it does help you win the game. But of course it's not the only factor.
*I'm actually currently in a period when I listen to music which is likely to never show up at any professional music service, but when I feel the need for mainstream music again, Spotify will probably be my choice for several reasons including the above, despite their recent Facebook-login only policy (which doesn't affect me, but still bothers me a bit).