Spotify's Beta Used 'Pirate' MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Spotify's Beta Used 'Pirate' MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay (2017)

torrentfreak.com

329 points__natty__253 comments

This is how the system works. This is a major lesson for all founders.

Don't worry about "regulatory." If your product matters, then you will be able to afford to solve the problem. If your product doesn't matter, then "regulatory" will not be an issue. Just ignore it.

I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive, but it is exactly how the world works. It's a really important lesson that I really wish I had learned earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677087 (see top reply)

In another sense, its the same with Uber and Airbnb, etc…

Exactly. YouTube was one of the OG examples.

Same with LLMs and copyright, I suppose.

Tell that to Kim Dotcom

Hmm, this is an interesting counterexample.

What was the difference? Did not have the correct investors? Did not have a unique enough product?

I would assume the latter. However, this is an interesting topic for discussion.

He knew that and talked about and used alledgedly illegal files. He should just not do the drugs himself and fire everyone who eats from the forbidden fruit and he would be fine.

Spotify did illegal stuff in beta, but they fixed it since then. Megaupload never cared about the law.

Compliance and capital vs. defiance and disaffiliation.

Devil is in the details. Teenagers tend to appreciate things that can seemingly collapse a complex topic into a binary black and white thing. The real world is nuanced.

While I have no proof, I feel like the fact that Megaupload wasn't in the US prevented them for using the correct legal loopholes that could have kept them aloft for long enough to grow to a size where they could settle these types issues out of court.

I don't know seemed to me everyone was using Mega for piracy...

The file lockers that pirates use today operate under the radar. The owners don't do interviews and they use crypto.

What's file lockers? Do you have examples?

Dropbox actually took action on shared files if piracy was reported. Megaupload made systems that faked they took action.

He launched Megaupload two years before Dropbox. Kim could have pivoted there, then expanded to docs/collaboration. Yes, hindsight is 20:20, but in theory it would have been possible moving from a piracy-centric business model to regular cloud storage/collaboration for businesses and small teams.

Regulatory does not matter if your product does not matter. Megaupload did matter, and did not solve the regulatory problem or change the business model.

Maybe it came too early for the solution or alternative business models to become apparent.

That takes me back to when Kim Kimble, known scammer, was going around boasting of representing some script-kiddie army fighting Al Qaeda.

I like to think that early exposure helped immunize me against some other self aggrandizing grifters over the decades.

https://www.theregister.com/2002/01/22/kimble_schmitz_deport...

This strategy worked out well for FTX

That's not along the same line of thinking.

Theranos was also a fraud. I am not talking about outright fraud.

I am just some shmoe, so I would love someone else to put this more clearly. Is what I originally posted intellectual property/regulatory arbitrage, vs. fraud?

Is there a better way to state this difference?

I mean Tesla self driving advertising is as much of a fraud as theranos… maybe it’s not as bad because it wasn’t a medical device?

No, it's acceptable because he bought the White House.

Promising a of self driving and delivering a much lower level is not nearly as much fraud as "the entire product does nothing". And it being a promise about future improvements also reduces the level of fraud compared to lying about what the product already does.

It’s not though because it somewhat works and the limitations are clear when you use it.

Theranos was completely fraudulent and there was no way to tell.

As with everything there’s lines you can bend and lines you just don’t cross. Gambling with your clients’ deposits is always going to mean jail time. Timing is also important, for example the US basically has given up on consumer finance protection laws and white collar crime being a thing, so while big companies can still sue you the government will let you get away with anything you like. Go for it!

https://soundcloud.com/anchorball/grifters-paradise

What a time to be alive!

This is generative AI music, aka the future of music?

It’s funny that AI needs that much auto-tune.

When it doesn't sound like auto-tune, is when we really have to worry.

Worked out better for Uber and Lyft. Say what you want about how ubiquitous those platforms are these days, they were unlicensed taxi services for years.

I think you’re not accounting for survivorship bias.

For example, Grooveshark was a direct competitor for Spotify with similar apps and features around the same time[0]. It got sued out of existence by the music industry, and back then quite a lot of music on both had that bootleg audio quality that sure points to piracy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark

I am not young, and I was around for both. What was the difference?

I remember going to Europe from the USA around 2012, and everyone was already using Spotify. Their music experience was vastly superior to ours. IIRC, they were based/avail in countries with really loose music copyright laws. Was that what made the difference? They grew huge where they could, before the hammer came down? Then too big to fail?

Again, IIRC, when the US music labels wanted to shut them down, they instead said: "hey, why don't you just buy a big piece of Spotify. We are already your distro. F the artists." I remember thinking that this was a gangster move. (btw, I still refuse to subscribe to Spotify.)

If you cant beat them, join them..

As a business practice, yes, exactly. Good idea!

As a personal philosophy, please, someone help me avoid nihilism.

The difference could be the attitude towards piracy, especially in the legal system.

Between 2006 and 2016, no one in the Nordics and Eastern Europe cared about piracy. By the time Spotify became prominent enough in the West to compete with music sales, it had already mainly been legalized.

Grooveshark was in the US, which has a very litigious business climate and is world-leading in copyright enforcement.

I can't think of a more plausible explanation. But I will say that breaking laws to later legalize is still only a successful strategy if one doesn't get caught. If anyone thinks this is a good strategy, I'd say there's survivorship bias going on.

I am totally on-board with your assessment, but also please add at least Spain to the loose music IP regime at that time.

> I'd say there's survivorship bias going on.

I agree that there is definitely survivorship bias happening here. However, what exactly is the punishment for failure? Is it worth the risk for the founders?

Well, I suppose one might say there's no risk so long as the corporate veil isn't pierced and the company is limited somehow. But that is a bit cynical and reductive. In cultures that hate piracy, the personal reputational risk is high. Besides, company officeholders are sometimes sued personally for their company’s ills. Even if they can defend themselves, it will cost much money and years of stress. Another risk, I suppose, is various opportunity costs—one wastes time and funding that could have been better used.

I also agree with your assessment, by the way.

> In cultures that hate piracy, the personal reputational risk is high.

Which cultures are we talking about? I assume not the US.

Look at Sean Parker - Napster got sued to oblivion, he became first president of Facebook and made literal billions.

His cofounder (Shawn Fanning) didn’t make it quite as big, but still sold a company to Blizzard for $30m. Plus whatever he made out of HNT.

Neither seemed to suffer any kind of stigma for their involvement in arguably the highest profile piracy startup.

> I am not young, and I was around for both. What was the difference?

imo the difference is that spotify at least tried to hide it

when you searched for songs on grooveshark you'd get names back like "Tame Impala - The Slow Rush (2020) Mp3 (320kbps) [Hunter]"

also IIRC grooveshark never even tried to set up revenue share with labels/artists

Spotify cheated behind the scenes and a veneer of following the rules, which eventually transitioned into actually following the rules and paying out artists

I was using Spotify Beta way back when, and they absolutely had songs named like that as well. I specifically remember one of Pink Floyd's albums (pretty sure is was a copy of the wall) as such.

grooveshark aggregated from blogs and other web sources. If I recall correctly you could follow links back to those places. Back then the web was full of decentralized independent writers doing music reviews or producing mixes or capturing new bootlegs from live shows. Grooveshark indexed those and made them playable in one location, but I don’t think it ever hosted any of the files.

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotif...

> Speaking of industry incestuousness, I suggest you read more about Tencent’s 9.1 percent stakeholding in Spotify, which is awe-inspiring in its spider’s web of vested interests. The short version: Tencent Holdings is about to own 10 percent of Universal, which in turns owns around 3.5 percent in Spotify, which in turn owns around nine percent in Tencent Music Entertainment, which in turn is part-owned by Universal’s two main rivals (Warner and Sony), but remains majority owned by Tencent Holdings, which in turn owns 9.1 percent of Spotify. (And, yes, no kidding, that’s the short version.)

Damn. Thanks for that. Oof.

Sorry for the tangent, but I've always wondered: does Tencent's partial ownership of Reddit give them any access to Reddit's internal data? Is that how that generally works, or am I making uninformed assumptions?

> Is that how that generally works, or am I making uninformed assumptions?

The answer is probably a bit more nuanced, but broadly, you're making uninformed assumptions. Blackrock own about 5% of Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, and we don't see people throwing around accusations that they're fiddling with their runnings.

I used to work for a company that Tencent had a minority (but significantly larger than 9%) share in, and they approximately 0 influence in our operations. Some places will be different, but if you've ever worked anywhere with a parent company you'll be familiar with just how untrusting the subisidiaries are. Honestly, I think the best way of thinking about it is the Larry Ellison Lawnmower joke - they're not out to get you, they don't care.

Whether or not that remains to be true going forwards who knows, but that's the same of any organisation anywhere in the world, and as someone who lives in Europe I'm far more concerned about what the US is doing right now.

Blackrock does not have any political motives at all, and is purely interested in management competency and money.

Tencent, despite being a for-profit company, may still have political motives pushed onto them from the very top. This is true for all chinese companies (because if they don't "comply", the very public example of jack ma is the answer).

Now, of course, it doesn't mean this power is utilized all the time or everywhere. It simply means that the opportunity exists for such power to be weld if the state calls for it. Just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it can't. It's different from Ellison Lawnmower, because the political differences between the countries.

>Blackrock does not have any political motives at all

Thats not true, at all.

They have donated millions in the 2024 election alone to a number of politicians[0]. They definitely have political motives

[0]: https://dallasexpress.com/uncategorized/blackrock-giving-big...

> Blackrock does not have any political motives at all

How do you figure?

> Blackrock does not have any political motives at all

Please paste this above all future comments you post to save HN readers’ time.

> Blackrock does not have any political motives at all, and is purely interested in management competency and money.

Seriously? You can say that with a straight face?

> Tencent, despite being a for-profit company, may still have political motives pushed onto them from the very top. This is true for all chinese companies

And that definitely won't happen in the US [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo

> as someone who lives in Europe I'm far more concerned about what the US is doing right now.

The fact that the US is now voting in the UN with Russia, Iran, NK, which mindlessly pushes the EU towards China is mind-blowing, and entirely understandable.

source: EU born, lived most of my life in the USA, then back in the EU for the last 10 years. I will truly miss the century of Pax Americana, and I hope for the coming century of Pax Europa.

Damn is that how they got their name? Does Tencent just mean "Ten Percent?"

Wikipedia says this about the name:

The name "Tencent" is based on its Chinese name Tengxun (Chinese: 腾讯), which incorporates part of Pony Ma's Chinese name (Ma Huateng; 马化「腾」) and literally means "galloping fast information".

So maybe it's just concidence? Their first product was also a messenger software so I don't see why they would name themselves "ten percent". The investing thing came later.

The difference is that Grooveshark was always a pirate product, and didn't try to hide it. The UI had rough edges, but the library was massive, just like the old Napster era. Spotify was a growth hacker startup bro project, influenced by iTunes.

So maybe without Grooveshark there would be no Spotify?

A different context for the proverb "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun YOU!"

They way I would describe it is, one wolf aspired to domesticate itself, the other remained wild and died by the law of the jungle.

Hah, I rather would say one of the wolves got strong enough to play with the big dogs. And is now making the rules of the music jungle biz.

Disagree. Spotify is not a wolf. The people who actually OWN the content are the wolves. And that is still the music labels.

If Spotify was really the wolf they wouldn't have to pay Universal billions. Not that much has changed really.

Spotify had a big library of fully licensed music as early as 2008 in European markets. They were the next evolution of the record label-friendly post-Napster music startups.

They were already the teacher's pet. Grooveshark was the one that was always getting suspended, before ultimately being expelled.

A dog can be brought to heel and will comply because it prefers the warmth of the campfire to the cold of the wilderness. A wolf will do wolf things until it dies. Or in this case, is hunted into extinction.

Then I'm not sure if this is a great example of the survivorship bias. One company tried to hide the piracy, the other didn't. One company operated from piracy-friendly countries, the other operated from a piracy-hostile country.

Survivorship bias is when two cases face the same selection process, not when one fails for taking an opposite approach.

Grooveshark had no ads and a much larger library in the early days. Also, you could upload your own tracks into the public listing. Iirc it was quite easy to embed a track or playlist as a widget into your personal website which was very cool in the era of non-walled-garden-internet. But it wasn't advertised as much as Spotify, not as many people used it, and the founders were the subject of tragic circumstances.

I’m curious if GS being located in the US made them a bigger target than an app in beta in Sweden. Also this only talks about its beta period but I’m assuming when it was actually “released” they had the deals in place.

Even established companies use pirated software.

The sounds in Windows XP were created in a pirated version of Sony SoundForge, and were only detected because of the metadata in the .wav files.

I guess companies can get "too big to sue".

If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a couple houndred millions, you own the bank.

There's several examples where this is true even in other industries, like Uber. That being said that is the wrong take away. Upon seing some unfair cases of crime not being put to justice, the response shouldn't be "everyone does it, let me do it too". In fact the idea that "everyone does" whatever crime you're considering is the first and foremost rationalization people make before committing crimes like tax evasion and so on.

I agree with your sentiment one hundred percent. However, I am just stating that this is how the world works.

Cryptocurrency is another horrific example, where the value-add is avoiding KYC = tax and sanctions evasion! I knew this over a decade ago, and decided to sit it out for moral reasons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit: to be honest, not just moral reasons. I just could not imagine that in a just world, this illegality would be allowed to continue. So little did I know.

Uber is really interesting example, since they started as a legit upscale taxi service, got mad Lyft flaunted the rules and regulations. They finally pivoted to the success story they are now after seeing how toothless the check and balances actually were.

It's really interesting how much Uber was trying to do things the right way, only to then over-correct into being the most devious and underhanded app-taxi company.

But the other company that Uber reacted to was Wingz, Inc, not Lyft.

I am being pedantic and never worked for Uber but I always assumed it was sidecar, I vividly remember them all over the city with their side mirror covers--don't ever recall seeing Wingz, though I am sure the existed.

I would argue it was not even so much that they were doing "things the right way", they were optimizing black car service and pivoted because it was not as lucrative.

What they pivoted to wasn’t lucrative either. I ubered all the time when it came out because pricing was like $4-7 for most trips that would be $30ish or more now. It was fueled on vc money to prime a generation of people going to bars to use uber and it worked perfectly. Now people just reflexively call that uber even when its surging to $60.

> Don't worry about "regulatory."

Are you recommending to break the law or are you being sarcastic? I sincerely do not know anymore.

Every rich person broke the law to get there.

Was it even possible to make a legal Spotify? I don't recall that any of the music labels were actually renting out MP3s.

It depends on exactly what Spotify does for you. Launchcast was a pioneer of personalized internet radio, starting in 1999. Pandora offered a similar service in 2005. Both of those services claimed legality through mechanical licenses for non-interactive play.

In the ~ 2005-2008 time frame, many monthly services sprang up to offer play any song from their catalog on demand, along with limited downloading, based on Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM program. Services included Yahoo Music Unlimited, Napster to Go (lol), (Real) Rhapsody, MSN Music and a bunch more. Afaik, this was all legal, but Microsoft shut down the DRM program with, I think, very little discussion as to why (but probably had to do with lack of market share in portable players)

I do recall some issues with the catalog on Yahoo Music Unlimited where the non-interactive catalog was bigger than the interactive catalog, because non-interactive has mechanical licensing and interactive play requires an intetactive licensing exercise between the rightsholders and the service provider.

If you're building an electronic device, "the next best gadget AI" , with a brand new Bluetooth chip that can communicate over 5 km by using some radioactive material, but you don't know whether it will be a success or not, you face two situations :

1. You do all government certifications like FCC, recycling, pollution, security, backed with scientific research that your chip is ok. This will cost a lot of money and time and might prevent you from reaching the market quickly.

2. You start selling asap as a Prototype. You make money and you can start the whole certification process. (or not).

The concept of Prototype is legal in many countries, there's often an official threshold of product sold at which your product is not a prototype anymore.

> Are you recommending to break the law or are you being sarcastic?

Does it have to be either of those?

They're just summarizing the lesson they see.

> Don't worry about "regulatory." If your product matters, then you will be able to afford to solve the problem. If your product doesn't matter, then "regulatory" will not be an issue. Just ignore it.

Unless you live in a country where copyright or other regulations can lead to actual jail time.

IMHO, companies intentionally breaking the law should be held accountable by going after executives - even if they left the company.

Worked for all the AI labs as well. Turns out you can steal the entirety of copyrighted works in existence on the internet without consequence if the resulting company is big enough.

This sounds backwards. All the big players in AI are getting sued while most of the minor players are flying under the radar.

The very top of the US government is partnering with and supporting OpenAI, Meta etc. None of these lawsuits are going to amount to anything more than a slap on the wrist. Their logic seems to be that AI is going to be a matter of national importance, and other countries will infringe the copyright anyways, so it must be allowed for the US AI industry to stay competitive.

There's a list of cases here [1]. The case against Github Copilot was already mostly dismissed despite it producing identical samples to license-restricted code. The cat is so far out of the bag now anyways with many open models and datasets containing the stolen data - there is nothing anyone can do about it now.

[1]https://www.bakerlaw.com/services/artificial-intelligence-ai...

If an individual did this, or what Facebook did, they'd get a prison sentence. Should startup founders give themselves prison sentences?

Spotify only got away with it after the fact because they pivoted to a model that gives money to the people who wanted to put them in prison before. And Facebook got away with it becau it's big.

> Should startup founders give themselves prison sentences?

Well this is the interesting thing. Have there been any, aside from the Mega example?

Move fast and break the law.

If Spotify was properly paying its share of royalty fees to the artists I don't think it violates any regulations that they used pirated versions of the music. It's simply more convenient for Spotify because they don't have to rip the music from a CD themselves.

When rights holders use a pirated version of their work it may be embarrassing, but it certainly doesn't violate copyright law. (Assuming the pirates didn't transform the work in a substantive way)

> I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive

I'm more offended by the idea that we should sit quiet and not do anything just because the status quo set up the rules in their favor.

The immoral part here is not using pirated content to build the initial catalog. The immoral part is that their success came by aligning with the exploiters (the labels) and not the exploited artists.

> I'm more offended by the idea that we should sit quiet and not do anything just because the status quo set up the rules in their favor.

Let's do something then. You lead the way and I'll follow.

My personal Spotify alternative is KEXP, KCRW human DJs -> Bandcamp purchases.

If anyone else could share any other radio stations who still have living human disc jockeys, I would love to check them out. DJs are an amazing resource which should be cherished.

https://kexp.org

https://www.kcrw.com/music

I mean come on, this is all amazing. Forget the music recommendation machine algos:

https://www.kcrw.com/music/articles/pachyman-samia-steel-woo...

The next logical step is for one of us to make a Spotify clone which leverages these human DJs, and gives credit with links to station and artist Bandcamp.

https://claude.ai/share/7c277bf6-eb65-4148-979d-f76ee6027fb0

Sure my share for knowledge live human DJs (about 75% of the time- they also have a few talk shows) is https://www.xray.fm/

No see that's where their ideals fall apart. They want YOU to lead the way. Go on lead the way, I'll follow.

I don't make any moral judgement unless I have Skin In The Game. In this particular case, you can follow me by joining the Communick Collective and pledging $20/month. Is that ok?

[0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...

Here's a direction we could take: Content distribution should be decoupled from content attribution & payment. If I have a collection of torrented music, I should be able to play it in a way that looks up who deserves to be paid for it, and aggregates that data such that at the end of the month, the artist gets paid.

Let's build it and get a bunch of people using it and show the world that the pirates are willing to pay the artists more than Spotify is. At such a point, why wouldn't everyone avast payments to Spotify and hoist the jolly roger in the name of paying artists more?

If someone lead in that direction, would you follow? Would you use the player that made the payments happen? Would you seed the torrents that made the player work?

Let's just get rid of the idea that we should pay to listen any song. I don't want to have my listening habits quantified or used as a proxy for how much any work of art is worth to me.

We can make this super simple: we can still keep the subscription model, we just need to change the revenue sharing system. Let's just charge a base monthly fee for the streaming service itself (say $1/month) and let's add a monthly "pay what you want" amount where 100% of the value goes specifically to the artists you choose.

So, let's say that I pledge to give $10/month, and I spread that around some 10-15 artists, This means that 90% of the money I am putting into the system is going to the artists. Someone wants to give $20/month, it would mean 95% of the money going to the "right" hands. We wouldn't have to argue about what the "right" hands are because that is defined directly by the people voting with their wallets.

Oh sure, I wasn't trying to propose that the coupling of usage to payment be mandatory. It's just that that's the setting I'd use because manually adjusting my payment settings sounds like work to me.

I'm just saying that paying the artist and handling the bits are totally separate things and if we want to challenge the existing model we should use something that decouples them in a way that demonstrates that the bad deal that artists are getting from Spotify is not the only option.

If you know the artists or anyone who would be interested to invest some time (and just a bit of money) to make this happen, let me know.

I have setup this system where people can set up how much they want to pay each artist per month (out of a fixed budget), and anyone that signs up to my service [0] gets an account on our Funkwhale server [1] where they can upload and promote their work. I take zero commission from these payouts, the only thing I need is to have content creators who prefer to pay a flat $29/year to have this instead of giving out 8%-12% of their earnings to Patreon.

[0]: https://communick.com

[1]: https://communick.stream

How could Spotify align with artists?

Make it a music locker service with a small subscription price and have an addon where 100% of the revenue goes to a pool of artists that make their catalog available there.

Spotify isn't a charity, it's there to rip off artists as well as the users calling it a service.

You ask this as if there are no competing companies that are more aligned with artists.

Tidal pays them more.

Bandcamp pays them even more and lets them run their own storefront.

Who cares about the artists? Spotify has to pay the music labels. If they are happy nothing else matters.

Not Spotify's fault that artists sign bad deals.

The immoral part is that it never changed, and they still pay artists pennies on what they make off their work.

People always think big mega corps are the most egregious offenders of skirting the law and doing nefarious things to avoid prosecution.

bruh...

Having been in industry for over a decade now, the opposite is true. Big mega corp has a huge legal team and is always looking to stop any law breaking. They don't need to break the law and doing so will only incur huge fines and huge negative public outcray. They pay compliance people to walk around and breath down managers necks.

Small corps on the other hand...it's basically a free for all of "do whatever it takes to get this over the line and keep it alive, and if it fails just walk away and let the public deal with it".

This was a BETA test, not the product... YouTube on the other hand...

Except for people making individual choices. I don't do business with companies that were founded by asshats. I will not use Uber even if they changed leadership. The shenanigans they pulled were inexcusable, and I will not whitewash them with my patronage. There are other companies for various similar reasons led me to make the same decision.

Unfortunately, there are many many more people that don't care and/or don't know about the decisions made by company leadership, so voting with my wallet makes no difference to the company. I just keep adding to my soapbox collection. Starry eyed world would have more people making similar decisions so that asshat companies do not succeed so that regulations would not be necessary. To bad that world doesn't exist

There maybe an inkling of truth for mass consumer markets where incumbents set up regulatory capture but it couldn't be more untrue for hard-tech companies or companies that work in dangerous domains where human safety is a concern.

Had alpha access and can confirm that this was the case. Also stated it a few years ago [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556181

Many of the early core developers were my seniors at university and the story I heard was that the early Spotify music collection was the superset of the staff's personal music collections. It was great, but once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since.

One anecdote that I have not stated before. In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user. Not sure how remarkable this is these days with Wine becoming so much more powerful, but it absolutely was in 2008.

I also remember sitting in the university staff lounge with some of said seniors and trying to mentally reverse engineer their implementation. Got most of it right; it was great fun and I owe said seniors a lot for "uplifting" me intellectually back in those days. Truly great people.

> once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since

I've had a similar experience where Spotify lost the license for some of the music I was listening the most at the time. That definitely broke the spell early on.

I sub to tidal so I can download the music. I have stopped giving a fuck about copyright in the AI age where companies steal for free. We already pay extra for any kind of storage (CD, Phone, SD, USB, HDD, SSD).

The price list is missing in English.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe#Aktuelle_S%C3%A...

Man I don't remember if it was alpha but I had pretty early access. That story might explain why some songs I remember disappeared, was this in about 2008-09? As I recall I got a ban or a timeout for not using it in Europe but I originally registered with a UK postal code.

Looking through emails I think somewhere between 2007-2008. We built a Spotify pirate clone when they went legit, it died because we were not good at being 1337/illegal, the cloud was not trusted, and most importantly Spotify was just easier (and legal).

I'm old school, I will never store anything in somebody's "cloud", rather buy X TB of disks, setup backup/sync to secondary location and I'm happy with that solution for more than 15 years.

Quite a few zoomers are transitioning into this mindset too.

I'm not the only person I know with a considerable storage array hooked up to a homelab powering services for family & friends.

I suppose the more 'normie' zoomers might not, but almost every IT/CS/Cyber/Engineering student I know has at least one self-hosted service they run.

Some even still collect CDs!

the question is how many do that exclusively. I have a local NAS that has all my files, but I also back it all up to the cloud as well, because if my house gets destroyed in a fire, I want there to be copy that's not there.

I keep three copies with syncthing.

Home, business, workshop.

What service do you use to backup your nas?

arq to backup my laptop to the cloud and my nas, which isn't the same as backing up my nas. for that there's backblaze

> In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user.

I used a bit later on linux via Wine and it was working just fine. One of the best Wine experiences I had back then.

I still remember my confusion when native linux client came out and crashed, produced choppy output or had issues to start at all... Weird times.

Yeah, I had the same experience, found a comment from 2018:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057725

Thinking about it I also remember a client I can't remember the name of that was mainly an indexer/file explorer on top of samba shares that just traversed everyone on the same subnet on SUNET that many used as a pseudo extension of their own library, sort of proto-cloud storage.

My experience too. Early Spotify had the best music and I could find pretty much everything I liked, plus excellent recommendations. I don't think it was that the music I liked was particularly obscure or anything, it was just that it was all there. I just couldn't believe how great it was! Once out of beta (alpha?), it lost that magic.

I was given an account when it was in beta. the breadth and quality was amazing. I would listen to Merzbow box set, obscure country, every album I could think of. I studied so many eras that I'd missed or never knew about.

When it went public most of my playlists got emptied.

This reminds me of how someone at Riot helped with patched wine versions to run League of Legends because they themselves used Linux. Not sure how good the support is these days with the new anticheat and all.

When our American exchange student showed her iPod with 300 songs that she had _BOUGHT_ my friend almost fainted. We couldn't believe it. We all had 10 000+ songs pirated.

In ~2009 everyone in Sweden pirated music. Using The Pirate Bay was considered mainstream and the cool kids in my high school were using more sophisticated sites. We thought Spotify was interesting because of the streaming. It was also free back then as there were no ads yet. No one even knew what IP rights were.

I was burning CDs for cash in my American High School before iPods. Once mp3 players with enough storage came out we started using those then iPods.

This was early 2000s and almost all kids using computers were downloading mp3s from Napster and Limewire. Once torrents came out I think the bar was higher for downloading tunes but music streaming services started to come out. Even before that lots of folks could copy their CDs and upload them to iTunes.

I think it wasn’t normal to buy 300 songs.

In terms of the computer literacy hierarchy you had people who were ripping FLAC files of whole artist discographies, then you had people going on piratebay for mp3, then you had people using “freeyoutubedownloader” type websites to get crummy mp3 files from youtube, then way at the very bottom of the totem pole, you had people asking mom for the credit card to buy songs at 99cents a pop.

I didn't trust Pirate Bay for mp3s or albums because of the rumors of people getting csam, and even if I trusted it, I was downloading at school so I couldn't get away with installing a torrent software (although it was 2010-2011, and I was using opera 11 with built in torrenting software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). The school would let us install other browsers and music players since they used an app blacklist not a whitelist. My friends and di would also use the PortableApps toolset to install unapproved apps like Quake 3 and networked chat software to our flashdrives and run them from there.

I used a Zune and synced all my music at school as a guest device, and there was no way for me to rip dicsographies to flac and had no hardware to play them.

The main way I got all my files back then, that you haven't listed here, was by googling the name of the album or song I wanted followed by either .zip or .mp3 and then the words mediafire, megaupload, or beemp3. "[album name].zip mediafire" this was when googles search bar features still worked and exposed most of the raw index (100s of result pages. Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle)

Only if I couldn't find it that way would I then resort to using "N°1 Free online Video Converter" onlinevideoconverter.com to rip a song from YouTube. That was usually reserved for meme songs like covers, the Ultimate showdown, Epic Rap Battles, and stuff like the Bedroom Intruder autotune and other Gregory Brothers viral hits.

My golden child older brother who was a way bigger intellectual (not technological) nerd than me was the one who begged for the credit card to buy songs once napster shut down. He wouldn't always buy from iTunes, sometimes he would "save money" by buying them for pennies on the dollar (like 20 rubles) from a Russian piracy site that purported to pay the artists, as though that gave him the moral high ground over my piracy, when it was obvious there was no way that was happening.

You had it easy. The internet was not able to handle video when we were doing this and audio streaming sites didn’t exist. You had Napster/Limewire, sketchy websites, and power users were still on usenet. The Scene was pretty popular and if you knew where to look you could find whatever.

Ripping from YouTube sounds awesome compared to people sharing their whole hard drive over Napster/Limewire/Kazam. There were military documents for c130, F22, you name it, there where whole businesses around finding military docs on file sharing programs and getting money by reporting them.

By 2009 music pirating in the US had been mainstream for 10 years.

I never used Spotify but I was an early Google Play user, now Youtube Music.

And I'm a big fan of underground 90s, 2000s gangster rap. Living over here in Europe we had to pirate most of it because the stores just didn't carry stuff like Dubee or Killa Tay.

So when I started streaming my old favorite rap tunes I noticed something very interesting. The Google Play copy of a Killa Tay album called Snake Eyes had the same abrupt encoding error as a copy I had downloaded from XDCC many years earlier.

It was basically evidence that Google Play were using the same pirated version I had acquired.

The early version of Google Play Music asked for your MP3s, so you could have them in the cloud for streaming. I guess they did this for a baseline of data and music and now I wonder if this was an elaborate hack to circumvent legal implications. Should have read the terms back then.

That would be an interesting story!

Uh, no, uploaded MP3s couldn't even be deduplicated across different users, because of lawyers. I know because I was there. The team had to ensure having maaaany petabytes of storage on launch day. Maybe the label or whoever owns the rights to the track today uploaded whatever they could find online? One way to verify that is checking if the same issue occurs on Spotify or Apple Music.

Filsystem level deduplication is always legal

Is that what the counsel said?

Nice! Love to hear the war stories.

Do you have insight into what may have allowed some of the anecdotes others are describing, of bootleg versions being the versions used by Google Music/Youtube Music?

I don't know. Weirder things have happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/comments/172b5kv/rocks...

I just checked Youtube Music and sure enough track 2 is still abruptly ended. I now own a physical copy of this album because I've been buying up all my childhood and teenage music, and my copy has the full song obviously.

It's so funny to me that a big "professional" service owned by Google is still 25 years later playing the same pirated music that I grew up pirating and listening to.

Of course this is a very low hanging example because it's such an esoteric artist but maybe there are more examples people haven't found yet.

I think people are missing that distribution without a license is the issue not where they got the stuff.

If Killa Tay is fine with them distributing a dodgy version...

Is the complete version 5:08 long, while the bad encoding is 4:28/4:29? Deezer and Apple Music have the latter, too.

> Deezer and Apple Music have the latter, too.

All online music services seem to have borked up copies of Bob Dylan albums that for the Bootleg Series albums with live content are missing the between-tracks bits that on the CDs are stored in the pre-gap.

i hope you're a fan of tommy wright iii from memphis

RIP grooveshark. Best of its kind, better than Spotify IMO. Just never managed to negotiate the licensing.

I think I met the founders at TechCrunch Disrupt in about 2008 and their reaction to "what about licensing?" (the most obvious question for a streaming service) was essentially "lol."

I'm not surprised they disappeared.

Not just disappeared. In fact someone literally died…

what?

The co-founder/CTO died due to unknown reasons after the settlement

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Greenberg

I was actually just thinking about Grooveshark earlier today; April will mark 10 years since it was shut down.

Lala is the one I miss - apple bought it and summarily executed it.

I miss it. It introduced me to some of my favourite artists

Is Grooveshark the Spotify alpha they are talking about in this article?

I recall being pretty confused by Grooveshark. It seemed… like, I mean, it was possible to stream a ton of music for free, so it had a vaguely pirate-y feel to it. But then, at the time YouTube also hosted a ton of music and other content seemingly without any license.

It was a weird time. IIRC lots of people seemed to think streaming was somehow distinct from downloading a file.

I used Songbird from roughly when it came out and one of the features that I like was using mp3 blogs as playlists, then downloading the files I liked. I'm sure most of them are gone now unless I happen to still have a harddrive around from that time. But I found so much music that way. I'm not sure how I found the blogs now? Maybe that was when they would list the blogs they linked to on the side, or the blogs the author liked. I remember coming across communities of Andalusian punk, Finnish metal, Norwegian electronic music, and digitized Soviet rock/punk. Now I look back and wonder if those mp3s were there to download because streaming wasn't quite accessible enough. That was probably just a 2-4 year period I'm thinking of, maybe 2005~2009?

Grooveshark was great.

I understand the need to protect intellectual property, and much as I hate how it is run in the US, copyright it vital, but it’s sad that platforms like Grooveshark are casualties of our system.

In around 2009, I remember my dad used to listen to music on his laptop a lot, but getting songs synchronized between different computers was a pain in the ass before the days of Plex or Jellyfin and the like. When I introduced him to Grooveshark, it was sort of huge for him; he started making tons of playlists, and it was easy to listen to stuff everywhere. IIRC he figured out how to install Flash on his early Android phone so he could stream Grooveshark from his car.

AudioGalaxy was my favorite, personally.

It's interesting that Spotify pioneered things that we associate today with AI. There's this, and then there's the bands they created to generate music so they could reduce exposure to musicians who would receive royalties

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

Oh wow I always suspected discover style playlists and broken random algorithm were there to down rank higher royalty artists that I wanted to listen to.

We need to get back to owning our own data and music.

Heh. I have some story around it.

+20 years ago I had a pop-star manager as my client. Super successful, resourceful with a business card holder filled to the brim; yet always on the lookout for opportunities.

One day we were chilling and I drawn a concept of a novel music platform. It wouldn’t distribute music (people could download it whatever) but instead granted unlimited license for a fee, and then based on telemetry tracking divide fee between artists and take some percentage as a profit.

We discussed it in detail and shrugged off as impossible to execute. Few years later Spotify came out and yet it took it 5 years to enter national market (due to licensing issues that came up during conversation).

I often looked at that conversation and brought up two lessons I learned.

First: anyone can come up with a magnificent idea, but it’s about execution and not daydreaming.

Second: even if you have everything you needed (there we had skills and resources) success is heavily context based.

Spotify could launch because they had friendly environment. My was hostile to license innovation, so we could do jack-

Spotify did not have a friendly environment, it was more passion that made it possible. I hope they can stand up against the giants like youtube, apple etc.

I have no love for Spotify but they were pretty revolutionary when they released mainly because they managed to go legit so early.

I'm not saying they had it butter smooth (great projects rarely start in completely free-for-all environments).

Main stopper was distribution of licenses. There were 100s of LLCs splitted into multi-level trees by ~30 big music groups keeping all the licenses and supervised by artists association. Every LLC kept 2-5 music distribution licenses without any discrimination, local musicians, foreign musicians. Licenses were in constant flux (it wasn't uncommon to 2 companies exchange licenses on weekly basis).

A simple reason was income distribution for tax reasons and law sanctioned such procedures. Changes came no earlier than in 2012 when many digital services were already available. And I know that simple answer would be "just ignore the law", but that was also a time when BSA with Microsoft were doing raids with hardware seizure (many of which overturned in courts years after initial seizure).

There's no equality of opportunities. That's it and nothing more.

I think we agree on the broader picture, what you describe is just the easy bit. Getting licenses for anything copyrighted is hell at a large scale. I interpret your comment like it has gotten better in the music industry but I do not think Spotify (or the others) want that because that is a big moat they have crossed.

Spotify launched in Sweden, initially, which is one of the most piracy-friendly business climates in the world, and also a very low-red-tape place to do business. American competitors existed and were ground into dust before getting off the ground due to all of the people with their hands out. Between ASCAP/BMI, the agents, the artists, and the record labels, the music business in the US has so many middlemen for the fact that it is such a small industry.

In your example, you gave up before even trying?

Be sure that almost everyone was hostile to Spotify very early on.

Shoot back in 2001 Rhapsody was already doing this, I used to use it to stream music all the time for a monthly fee. Ironically in 2016 they rebranded as Napster. Spotify ended up winning in the end because they used a freemium approach instead, also Rhapsody was a bit too ahead of its time.

Joke by Emo Philips which is deep on many levels :

“I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked God for forgiveness.”

The secret ingredient is crime

One cup of developing fast Two cups of breaking things Three cups of ignoring licensing Four cups of breaking laws Five cups of huge risk Six cups of money Seven cups of lawyers Eight cups of success

Had to make this into a country ditty on Suno.

https://suno.com/song/556b62fc-bcd8-4757-951a-018c5cf0a60b

Never had a comment translated into song. That was awesome! Thank you! :)

That was.. surprisingly good TBH.

Yeah it's why I'll never write a track to be published, ever again. I never made any money as a musician, and now anyone can put together stuff that people want to hear.

I imagine it's similar to amateur artists with SD, and social media managers with LLMs.

This is the song I did about the South Korean president coup/whatever (lyrics mostly in Lojban) https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music...

I wrote lots of music, tho.

Hold music for my pbx. https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music

... get your first millions (or any other digit) any way you can (just don't get too greedy) and then continue like regular business. I rarely meet self made people who do not have some kind of blank spaces in their past, even though now they are reputable members of capitalism.

The secret ingredient is cybercrime

Could it be that Spotify had the licenses (mostly) in place at the time, but that the labels didn't happen to have a nicely wrapped zip file of all of their catalogues ready to hand over? In that case, using pirated music seems perfectly legitimate..

Not if they were getting it from PirateBay and partook in also seeding the files others.

They had direct or indirect scene connections and got reliably high quality material. Lots of it. Like Oink amounts.

That's what I liked about the early service, they had so much obscure and niche stuff that it was fun and interesting to just browse and discover. Then the entertainment mafia bought in and they deleted huge portions of the catalogue, and I never returned.

Bandcamp was good until recently, now it's turning into a garbage dump for "AI" gunk.

At least Bandcamp has days where 100% of the money goes to the artist if I buy something of them.

It's fine if they do it like Facebook - just leech.

Also have Facebook's money and army of lawyers.

You still get C&D for your IP bring in the swarm. Uh, this is useful information to know.

>legitimate

Logical? Yes. Legal? Not necessarily.

But it's fine because now they have a lot of money and _checks notes_ contribute to the economy or something.

This sums up the history of Western countries.

(2017) Discussion at the time (123 points, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14307986

If they were paying the labels, does it matter?

Maybe. If RIAA subcontractors were downloading those files, then that would seem to undermine the argument that the people uploading them were doing so without proper authorisation.

If I buy a CD, am I then allowed to pirate the mp3s? I think the RIAA would say no.

Why not? You could also just rip the CD

That's my opinion too, but I don't think the RIAA or MPAA would agree.

Neither the RIAA or the MPAA have enforcement powers. Their positions are irrelevant.

The basis of copyright in the US is that being able to sue and win is an enforcement power.

That’s the core thing the government is giving copyright holders, and what the public is protected from when something enters the public domain.

They have enforcement powers if they they prevail in the suit and the people who have legal power enforce their will. Which is something that has happened in the past. That includes them just successfully abusing the defendant into settling, no matter if they would have won in the long run.

The RIAA clearly has the power to enforce economic harm on anyone who has to defend their lawsuits. Against small enough defendants, that makes their positions extremely relevant.

Anyone can sue anyone. Just because they think something is illegal, doesn't mean it's actually illegal. They still need to convince a judge. Therefore their stance on whether you can rip CDs is irrelevant.

Lawsuits only get expensive when they can’t instantly be dismissed.

If I sue you for something ridiculous like using telepathic mind control to get my dog to bark satanic messages, the judge will just dismiss the case pre trial. If you launch a bunch of such frivolous lawsuits I can get a lawyer to counter sue you and win on contingency with zero out of pocket expenses.

When I worked with Rdio the RIAA sued them because users would make playlists named "Now that's what I call music < X >" with the same songs as the CDs. All the songs were fully licensed to be streamed on the service. The RIAA won those lawsuits.

edit: they might have actually settled, but the RIAA got what they wanted with no concessions

Did the RIAA win or Rdio settle?

The RIAA doesn't seem to have a very good track record in cases that go to court, but the whole 'we're gonna sue you for eleventy billion dollars and destroy your life with our thousands of lawyers, but give us $20 right now and we'll call it even' seems to be quite effective.

You know, you might be right that in the end it was a settlement of sorts. I remember for a while they were fighting it specifically because it was about playlists (named groups of songs) which was not defined in the licensing in a way that clearly did or did not overlap with albums. The more I think about it, there was such a threat of refusing to renew licenses that it's possible they renewed with explicit language that prevented these playlists. I know for sure the playlists were purged. All said it was a hilarious amount of lawyer money over some of the dumbest CDs ever.

That’s a clear trademark violation though.

That sounds exactly like what youtube music does

I miss Rdio. Always thought it had the better UI and recommendations.

They're disagreeable across the board.

I use this “Apple match” service with iTunes. I think the idea was it found songs from cds I ripped and served me the same song from the cloud(without uploading) for a small yearly fee.

Though it did spend a long time uploading but I have a few phish concerts and a huge amount of classical I bought (Deutche Gramaphone has a best of collection they sold direct that was pretty big)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_l...

“by Apple (and formerly Amazon.com) was "scan-and-match", which examined music files on a computer and added a copy of matched tracks to the user's music locker without having to upload the files.”

Don’t know how much longer this will last.

This service still exists, and you can even still pay for it separately, but it's also included with Apple Music.

Note that there are two different matching products:

- iTunes Match: matches files by audio fingerprint and gives you 256k AAC unDRM'd files. If it doesn't match, uploads files to "iTunes in the Cloud" digital locker feature (files may be converted to AAC prior to uploading). Costs in the order of 20-ish € a year.

- Apple Music: matches files by audio fingerprint and gives you 256k AAC FairPlay-protected files. Can't recall if it uploads (I think it does?) and how it converts (might convert to FairPlay protected?).

Both have song count limit (10k or something for iTunes in the Cloud), and they may differ (not sure, Apple Music may be higher).

If you have both, iTunes Match applies.

You can if you do it on radio.

You don't pay for the physical medium, you pay for the right to play the song to other people.

That's the right to play the music, but you received it through illicit distribution which, depending on jurisdiction, can result in liability.

You're being downvoted, but you're correct: bits can have (legal) colour.

As I recall this is the case in France: even if you own a CD, getting a bit-for-bit copy of it that was originally produced unlawfully runs afoul of reproduction rights. IIRC this was even challenged and confirmed in court.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23/

The RIAA only cares about seeding, not leeching/DLing.

Depends entirely on your definition of the word pirate and the jurisdiction you are in.

If you have a CD and a license to stream the CD, it's going to be hard for the licensee to sue you for streaming a rip of the CD instead of getting a copy directly from them.

Probably not. When I was doing audio ingestion for the major labels 1999-2004 it was all from CD. Some CDs (*cough* Sony *cough*) had such fucked-up shit to try and stop ripping it was easier just to source the files from audiogalaxy.

Couldn't EAC just bypass all that? I don't remember owning a CD it couldn't rip.

It depended far more on what optical drive you had than on what software you used.

Big corps steal what I have wrote on the net over the last 25 years. They even use it in ways I don't agree with and sell products from it.

Isn't this common knowledge? All the big companies got their start either through theft or copyright infringement.

It's even a pattern in normal business. Crime families or individuals will acquire enough capital from crime to go (mostly) legit and then they transfer to running normal business. Short term high risk to get the seed money, then long term traditional business income and stability.

The Mafia model?

Quite common in Mexico and South America more broadly. It's quite typical that a middle-aged rancher or corrupt police officer sees an opportunity to make some extra money, scales it, and then finds himself at the center of a criminal enterprise with so much money that he ends up going back into legitimate business. Hospitality and agriculture (specifically tree fruits like avocado) are the big ones in Mexico. In Colombia it's emerald mining, pharmaceuticals, and ranching.

Crunchyroll was first launched as an anime pirating site, and even received venture capital funding while it still allowed uploads of unlicensed content to the site.

The most alarming thing to me was that early versions of Spotify would scan your local computer to find music to share. I had to ban it from my office network. My employees had no idea that it was doing that and no way to prove that it was only sharing music.

Here is my comment from earlier regarding this very thing, and it seems like one of these is incorrect? Who can tell me the truth?!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972523

One cool feature that early Spotify had is that you could put your own MP3s in your playlists and Spotify would synchronise them across your devices.

How modern technology should work, but doesn’t anymore.

I agree that would be what good software would do, but what incentives would Spotify have to do that? They would have to pay for hosting and are possibly legally responsible for the file content, which could itself be illegal. And most people today who use Spotify don't extensively listen to music via MP3 files.

They wouldn’t have to host the files.

Didn't Apple also do this, or did that require that you had the CD?

Apple still does (CD is not required), it's called iTunes Match. It used to be standalone, but nowadays it's part of Apple Music.

This comment made me realise I’m still paying for iTunes Match and probably haven’t needed to for several years.

Google Play Music also used to do this.

That's still possible, although not as seamless as it was on Google Play music where you could upload music to Google's servers and stream just like their official library.

In Spotify, you have to point the desktop client to a local folder with your music. I have then made a special playlist where I put those songs and mark that as available offline on my phone. I'm pretty sure it only syncs while on the same LAN. I have some of that local music in other playlists as well, and it mostly works fine. I don't use it a lot, but I think the key is to make sure it's available offline on the device you want to play it on.

Ok that’s good! I’ll hav to try it out

This confirms my suspicions.

I used to use spotify a lot from 2010-2015. Around that time I started to buy CDs of the music that I really liked. This mean that I was finally getting legit high quality copies of stuff I had already.

It was then that I noticed that certain, more obscure albums on spotify had the same corruptions and odd encoding artifacts that my non-legit copies had, but the actual CD didn't. (sometimes the rips were shit, some had CD dust skips, other had other corruption type errors)

So it makes sense.

I thought this was already a well known thing? Spotify historically set aside the money from those song plays for any legal costs incurred by playing without a contract.

The best players in every game, including business, are the ones who bend and push beyond the rules. Sometimes the rules evolve, sometimes you get too close to the sun.

The big winners are often ambitious players with appetite for risk, including legally and ethically questionable business practices. The risk/reward ratio is high so there are players who will do whatever is necessary to get big returns.

I guess we don't hear too much about those who failed, unless they fail big like Theranos and FTX.

Wow I did not know the Spotify dudes came from torrent tech

Around 2012 I got some credits for Amazon Music (or whatever it was called at the time) so I bought and downloaded a couple of international albums. Then I noticed tracks in a single album could have three different bitrates. Not definitive proof that the files were ill-gotten but very fishy.

From Wikipedia:

> All tracks were originally sold in 256 kilobits-per-second variable bitrate MP3 format without per-customer watermarking or DRM

Don‘t remember 100% but wouldn‘t the variable bit rate explain this?

Doubt it. It was something like 128k, 192k, 320k. Who the hell encodes the same album like that.

I purchased an mp3 from Amazon Music, and there was a song that had a glitch in it, like you used to get ripping CDs if there was a problem reading part of the disc. I torrented the same track and the same glitch was there. So either Amazon was using pirated copies or the glitch existed in the actual recording. I guess I'd need to find a physical copy of the recording to compare.

Not surprised. Many successful video platforms started with pirated videos. Copyright is not a word in their dictionary. And once they get big enough/have enough investment money, they suddenly become the good guys, activity engaging with copyright holders to sort things out.

For fractions of pennies

I was in the spotify beta, can confirm it was all pirated mp3. The client would even upload all songs I had and they didnt to their cloud.

The worst part to me was the beta account was a lifetime premium which they just turned into a free account along the way, after snagging my mp3 collection.

>The client would even upload all songs I had

You may wish to edit your attempt to SWIM this

They were all doing that. I remember deezer asking you to upload music if it were missing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHgc8Q6qTjc

Why did Spotify prosper and grooveshark fail?

Move fast, break things.

it’s been tech’s motto all along, it’s not a good motto, but it works cause the system is messed up

Does it matter?

I am concerned about the periodic attacks on Spotify, while the elephant in the room, YouTube, escapes unfettered. Everything from artist royalties to hosting the Joe Rogan show.

And as it happens, Spotify isn't a FAANG or a US company, so isn't that convenient?

Burn Spotify to the ground.

Yeah, it ads to a pattern of zero morals/ethics/standards. As someone whose mother was harassed for wearing a mask (she was dying of cancer during COVID) I will forever hate Spotify and Joe Rogan. And I'm a hippie live and let type. But I actively hate those two.

But enjoy your fake Spotify created muzak and algo optimized to the lowest royalty payout not your music tastes all while supporting Joe boy (leader of the last 250 comics).

Exactly what I said.

So you're OK with YouTube hosting Joe Rogan while they also maintain a monopoly and not giving a damn in general, because they are too big for that.

https://www.youtube.com/@joerogan

Tell me, how does that work out for you?

Spotify paid Joe Rogan how much? Spotify pushed Joe Rogan as the shit. Spotify owns the Joe Rogan hate. Youtube didn't do all that. Youtube didn't make Joe Rogan their mascot, Spotify did. If I open Spotify to this day there's a huge block in the middle of my music for their guy Joe Rogan. You want me to just ignore that because Youtube exists? F' off with that bs.

You don't get to dictate my response to them. My mom broke down in tears multiple times, was afraid to go out shopping. The stores here had to make special shopping times for people to feel safe to go shopping. While she way dying of cancer. Fuck Spotify and their little mascot and fuck anyone that want's to pretend making someone your maskot and promoting them first thing on your app is somehow the same as allowing that person to have any content on your platform and I either have to criticize both or none.

Maybe we can criticize two things at once. Who isn't criticizing YouTube?

Youtube hosts so much useful things (mathematics videos, instructive videos in general) that it is far more valuable to the humanity.

Youtube is to a greater degree the original source of a lot of cultural works, than what Spotify is.

all the big ones did it, Airbnb used to be spammers. lol.

"""Growth hacking"""

lol

Nah, AirBnB started by selling fake cereal.

Funny, I got downvoted to hell when I said this exact thing some while ago.

yeah I know, i had to C&D them to take my music down forever ago

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