Spotify Down | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Down

community.spotify.com

49 pointswhirlwin35 comments

Not surprised. Spotify crapping out constantly and songs disappearing drove me away from streaming. So in 2023 I stopped paying for streaming services entirely and have gone back to actually buying CDs and ripping them or hitting bandcamp for FLACs etc.

Life is much better. No one can take my shit away, I don't depend on some transient service existing or license or any external competence and I can choose how much I want to pay and when. It just works.

I think I was born an old curmudgeon because I've essentially always felt this way. That said, Spotify got me to subscribe at least for a bit because I could not match its catalog and convenience. I also try and keep a FLAC archive of all music I might want, but some things just don't exist on other mediums these days.

Unfortunately I was seduced by the iPod years ago. I ripped then sold mine and the ex-wife's CD collection totalling some 1800 albums years ago. Then went streaming and as about 99% of that was covered, deleted it all because I couldn't be bothered to manage it all.

I wish was that old curmudgeon you mention back then!

Is there a way to sync a library of FLACs for example across devices? Like a music player that syncs with a private S3 bucket?

I just plug my iphone into my mac and drag the files into VLC.

Last thing I want to do is make things even more complicated or have to maintain and pay for my own homebrew spotify.

Not sure if S3 is a hard requirement for you. But many in the self-hosted community use Plexamp/Jellyfin.

I personally really like: https://github.com/sentriz/gonic

Put it behind tailscale or similar vpn and listen to your music anywhere!

Yes I also host a Navidrome instance at home and connect using subtracks on Android or Feishin on macOS/Windows, and have a Wireguard VPN for connecting when out-and-about.

Even the status page is down

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/ongoing-issues/

hosting the status page on the same domain as the service is a choice

It's on a different subdomain for support and hosted by something else. So while some domain ownership issues or poorly prepared dns changes could impact both, it's not the same as their actual service.

The status page being down should be a good indicator of the status

It's called a liveness probe :) maybe they use it for load balancer health checks...

And here I am playing King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's latest single on repeat in VLC like a chump.

I hope they post a post-mortem afterwords. Given that the outage seems to be on an infra-level (support domain is far from the app stuff) I take it something really funky has happened.

over/under on it being DNS??

It's not DNS.

It can't be DNS.

It was DNS.

looks like someone might have nuked their entire Kubernetes cluster again

Huge fan here, sad to see people so up in arms. Spotify offers two valuable things: of course, every song ever with no need to tag them, manage your library etc etc

But most importantly it’s insanely good for discovering new cool music.

It’s the latter - discovery - that I pay for. Song radio, artist radio, “discover weekly” get me through the day.

Spotify outages are rare enough no one thought it could go down. They’re doing well. Consider: if you manage your own music library there’ll be days the hard drive doesn’t work, vpn dies etc etc. - to operate at 99.99% reliability you’re only allowed 4 minutes’ downtime per month. If you dick around fixing your NAS for an hour you just blew your whole year’s downtime budget.

So for Spotify to go so long without downtime is amazing.

Looking forward to the postmortem!

every music platform that claims to have great discovery eventually decides i've discovered enough and then starts to repeat things just like corp radio. the discovery is a sham. of course it's going to sound great when you first start to listen to something different, but there's only so much out there. eventually, they're going to start streaming preferred things at you

My self-managed on-device music library has 100% uptime. I don’t know why you think managing your own library has to include everything you mentioned.

“Every song ever” is a frustratingly inaccurate summary, as someone who’s had their songs pulled off the platform with no notice that I wouldn’t hear them again.

Happen to be flying right now and luckily downloaded content continues to play. (Obviously.) I am looking forward to reading a post-mortem.

time to see what downloaded content I have...

My trusty local files from bandcamp, 7digital, and amazon have yet to fail me.

Streaming itself seems to work though, I could just press play on my Sonos system and it just continued with the playback.

Maybe it's still working due to caching?

I was playing Spotify music till about 20 minutes ago, but I noticed that the last song that was scrobbled to Last.fm was at 14:17 (1.5 hours ago)

This outage gets me thinking of alternatives. It's nice to have just a folder of music that is completely offline.

App and streaming mostly work for me (slower then ususal and search seems broken). Interesting outage.

at least offline playback works, though the ui is still sluggish when it thinks it should be able to reach their servers (airplane mode is snappy, bad internet connections or service outage it waits for long timeouts).

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