Spotify as a simple case study in making something people want
blog.garrytan.com
blog.garrytan.com
Edited for duh...
It helps that Spotify is (partly) owned by the record labels: http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part-owner...
It's what makes shutting down Grooveshark and going after other music services so ridiculous - it's not a matter of wanting to combat "piracy" as much as it is about wanting to make sure that their favored candidate wins, instead of an independent one.
Again, remember that the RIAA currently has authority not just over artists signed to major labels, but over artists signed to independent labels as well[0], so they really do truly have cartel-like power, and they are clearly not interested in giving that up.
[0] A subsidiary of the RIAA has the sole legal authority to collect royalties on behalf of all artists, and then artists can request remittance of payments from this subsidiary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, independent artists report mixed results with actually getting the RIAA's subsidiary[1] to pay them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange#Authority
[1] Technically SoundExchange is now a 501(c)3 and no longer owned by the RIAA, to make them appear more "independent", but this is a change in name only.
These same content licensing advantages are given to Netflix and Hulu.
FYI - Hulu is owned by Fox, Disney and NBC.
Spotify is partially owned by Sony, Universal, Warner, and EMI.
You need to use common sense when you enter an industry about your strategy. It can't all revolve around great tech.
I'm sure the back end is technically awesome, but I really hope Spotify gets some competition from a party that actually cares about music and the user experience.
Spotify could be so much, much better. Instead they're just lazily exploiting their licensing advantage and what is effectively a monopoly. (Pandora isn't available where I live, nor in most parts of the world.)
(To be fair, half the mess the UI is is probably caused by pressure from the music industry to peddle their crap regardless of what the user actually wants. At least that's what I hope, otherwise Spotify is even worse than I thought.)
If I created a service that allowed unlimited streaming of the latest movie releases for $10 a month / ad supported , pretty sure it would be pretty popular.
The 200ms latency 'wasn't possible' because of how TCP congestion control works. Spotify used to use 2 channels for downloading - the first chunks would come from their servers, then you would try and download the rest of the song and do read-ahead on the p2p network. Consequently, the TCP connection to their servers would be idle for a bit causing the congestion window size to drop back to 1 segment (1500 bytes) in size. Over higher latency networks (wireless), TCP slow-start could take up to a couple of seconds to get up to speed, as you need a RTT to increment the segment size. Spotify's trick was to build (compile, more likely :)) a version of TCP on their servers that prevented the congestion window from connected clients from dropping back.
This is distinct than the company becoming profitable; many companies will increase in value while not being profitable.
The original commenter is making this comment I presume because he/she thinks Spotify is a mature enough business where it should be generating profits instead of operating at a deficit in order to grow and grab market share.
² this is massively huge for people with bandwidth caps on their mobile contracts
Either way neither product is doing particularly well with it. So easy to see why Spotify isn't bothering to add this feature.
Anyone know how spotify may have achieved this? My instinct is that they pre-download the next song in the queue + heavily cache everything. But in my experience, playing a new song in almost instantaneous too.
With just an song id, with S3/Cloudfront and [db of choice] I don't think it would be hard to deliver a song in less than 200ms (to the continental US atleast).
[1] http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/are-io-latencies-killing... - Random article, I'm not sure where I picked it up from, but I've come to believe >100ms db latencies should be rare and when it happens, you messed up somewhere.
Anyone know how spotify may have achieved this?
There is no magic in this. 200ms is an eternity and would actually be considered rather poor performance.
Realistic latency is closer to 100ms for a cache miss (~40ms for your client to reach spotify plus another 40-60ms for their internal fetch).
You have to realize that music files are tiny and consume very little bandwidth by today's standards. All commercial music combined (roughly 30 million songs) fits into half a rack of storage.
They shut that down last year; https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...
Something that they could do differently that might be interesting, is to special case ad plays for new and returning users and slowly increase the quantity of ads that are played. This way my initial experience is very positive and as I get used to incorporating spotify into my workflow, I get more used to ads, and can decide whether I want to be a paying customer or use the product with ads. I wonder if anyone else has incorporated similar growth hacking strategies.
Just throwing this out there because you mentioned it's been a while since you used Spotify -
Spotify offers a premium service for $10/mo which allows unlimited music without ads playing every few songs [1]. If ads are the deciding factor in whether or not you consider the application "really great" and you decide it's worth it to you, the option is there for ad-free listening.
[1] https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/
Looks like they have a deal right now - 3 months for a buck.
Perhaps this was intentional :-)
However instead of buying premium, I just use Spotify for discovery. If I like something I just get the album off iTunes, Amazon or Bandcamp. I find myself spending less per year than if I had subscribed to Spotify, _and_ I get to keep my music.
I'm already paying for it, yet there is no way to turn of the notifications and very hard to opt out of Facebook integration.
It's still an awesome product, but I hope they don't lose the magic.
I remember that this is what blew me away about Spotify ... I'd used streaming services before, rdio, grooveshark etc .. but on my phone the streaming would take a while to load, in bad patches of reception it would cut out etc etc. Spotify was the first mobile streaming experience that made it to where I didn't need my itunes any more, and I never looked back after that.
Its a shame who ever is running the UX for their products is trying really hard to roll back all the awesomeness and good will they've worked for, by making questionable decision after questionable decision, their latest desktop update being the case in point.
- They removed Album view a few years ago now (version 0.8.4) ... I still have that version installed at home because I like/need it so much.
- They removed starring/favoriting of songs, in favor of some other (add song/add album) thing that just doesn't work the same way despite them asking you to try it that way.
- In the latest version of their app they moved things around that had be in locked positions for YEARS ... for no reason.
- Then they removed the ability to search inside of playlists ... again for no reason you can see the fury of the masses in all its beauty here ... https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/... ... completely ignored by spotify of course.
- Their mobile app is still mostly great but has a couple of no brainer things that they've never got right (playlists sort in reverse order from what you'd expect, now you can't delete a song from a play list without editing the entire play list etc etc etc
Spotify just stopped caring about what the people wanted a long time ago ... they've gotten slow and bloated and I bet they have an army of Product managers poring over all sorts of data and making these weird decisions, instead of engaging their common sense ... either way ... if something comes along that has a bit more soul, and love for its customers ... I'm off in a heart beat, and yes, I've paid the full price for spotify for almost 4-5 years now.
Excuse my ignorance, but what is the album view, and how is it different to what's currently in the app (as there seems to be something that I'd consider to be an album view for OS X)?
As for the rest of your points, you are on the money; seems to be a lack of commonsense.
The difference was that you could turn it on in any playlist not just look at it in the "Albums" sidebar item
Personally, in the latest updates I've found it much harder to get to whatever list you're playing from.
It lets me sample new music instantly and organically without needing to pirate anything, and if I really like something, I can buy it and add it to my Plex too. Yes I know that I can probably find the album on certain torrent sites, download it in less than 1 minute, unpack it and then get the song I wanted to listen up and playing.
But that's a hell of a lot of work, compared to just double-clicking the song and having it playing instantly. And if the song sucks, you dont need to keep seeding albums you actually want to delete just to maintain ratios at private trackers, etc etc.
Using Spotify is just so much less hassle. These days I find I use Plex less and less for music, and Spotify pretty much gets used 99.9% of the time.
So I'm curious: What do you think is crap with Spotify?