If you are interested in their story how the original client and architecture came to be and then how it changed to what it is today they have a podcast you can listen to: "Spotify: A Product Story" - https://pca.st/cbo7khrm
Just finished listening to this, thanks for the recommendation.
They spend some time interviewing Lars Ulrich of Metallica in the context of of the Napster lawsuit. He comes across in this interview as still upset at Napster for what they did, and he is at turns indignant and also emotionally wounded at the fact that they are perceived as the villains in the story. In particular he cannot seem to reconcile his belief that they, and I quote "are the most fan friendly band on this planet" with suing Napster for $100k per download in damages, a ludicrous and arrogant sum. I am not a Metallica fan and do not listen to their music (out of disinterest, not antifandom. Metal isn't my genre), but it is striking to me to see how 20 years on they still don't get it.
I watched a documentary they made about themselves... Only went there because two band colleagues ask me if i wanna come. In one scene he stands in front of a 4mx4m painting he is going to auction off. Some colors smeared over black foundation, ugly as hell if you'd ask for my irrelevant opinion. Sipping a drink he says: "Sometimes i stand here and ask myself: 'What did the artist think when he made it?'"
Slayers' drummer Dave Lombardo said about his colleague Kerry King: "He is the dumbest person i know."
You don't have to be smart, your ego problems figured out or a likeable personality to make great music.
Narcissim plays its part too. I think actually is okay to want to be admired by others by accomplishing great things. I think it is a biological urge to attract a mate. Doseage makes the poison though.
Ulrich took it personally, thinking it was somebody stealing from him. I'm convinced Metallica would have faded to irrelevance far earlier if people hadn't downloaded their music.
A lot of musicians still think this way, "I should be able to make a living from my craft and thus piracy is theft." But that's a misunderstanding, I believe -- people would still pay money for music, just like they pay money to creators on YouTube and the likes even if most of the content is freely available.
Here's a great clip (from the amazingly deep diving podcast What Had Happened Was) with El-P from Run the Jewels, et al, about why RTJ gives away their albums, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdtLTw7Xsj8.
Anything that qualitatively changes what survival means to us, will change someone. For good, bad, indifferent. For most people a combination.
A close friend gave me insight on why success changes people, after I hit a milestone that mattered to me. He told me, "You are still going to have problems, they are just going to be different problems."
Each of our moral outlooks, stability, suitability for state of life, relatability, etc., is heavily dependent on our relationship with our survival environment. And success radically changes that relationship qualitatively, when it changes it much quantitatively.
Thanks! It's great to read the backstory of how the original Spotify client came to be:
> "Not to go into too much detail here, but at the time, most of the internet was made up of “thin clients,” like web pages or Flash-based clients that ran in-browser, and used more traditional, standardized protocols like HTTPS. Seeing the limitations of that, Ludde and a team of engineers ran in the exact opposite direction, creating a stand-alone “fat client,” building entirely new protocols and hybridizing client-server and P2P technology to suit their own ends. (Check out Episode 01, “How do you steal from a pirate?”, to hear more of that nitty-gritty stuff about persistent TCP connections and how our P2P implementation saved us bandwidth cost.) It was only by rethinking every layer of our infrastructure that we were able to pull Spotify off, to create that magic moment of double-clicking on a new song and having it instantly play. And speaking of magic …"
Having been an early user of the beta I presumed it had to be driven by people with this mindset from rethinking everything from bottom up to provide the best UX possible, would really love to read more about the technology used in the original Desktop client?
EDIT: Currently listening to “How do you steal from a pirate?” which is providing a more detailed backstory on the origins of Spotify:
Sounds like Ludde Strigeus, the creator of µTorrent was the key hire to make the original Desktop Client UX possible whose Desktop & P2P expertise was able to convince the rest of dev team to go down the path they did. Some interesting insights, they used Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3 using a custom designed TCP protocol because they were better able to strip packet bits down to transport just the audio bits required for playback.
> Michelle: The thing that happened that was kind of pure magic in that meeting was that [Daniel] did a comparison. He started playing a song on the software, and the song played so quick, so instant … I mean, I don’t know if people remember, but playback was slow back then. Even if you had an MP3 on your computer, and you played it via, you know, Winamp, iTunes, this was faster. And we were like, “You have the files on your computer, right?” And he was like, “No, it’s in the cloud.”
I had the same initial experience where I was blown away at how instant and responsive it was, at first I didn't believe it and thought it was doing some sort of pre-caching magic where it'd start downloading before selecting each song. So ran lots of tests where I did first time searches and immediately scroll to songs down the list of search results (to bypass any caches) and could see that it was indeed pulling traffic in real-time, the time from click/scrubbing to audio playing was just unbelievably fast.
Yes, I miss this so much, I actually stopped using Spotify about 6 years ago. This might be nerdy, but the feeling of instant playback was just great.
This Electron crap is really a race to the bottom, so you can hire the cheapest college drop-outs to cobble together some JavaScript to add feature number 1001.
On another note, this ludde guy is one of the few rock stars in IT to me. Had a lot of fun on ScummVM, played OpenTTD to death, used µTorrent in College, you name it...
It's probably easier for various teams not to break things, and it provides a more widely known environment (the browser essentially) to ensure that new hires can be pretty productive.
I definitely miss native apps, but I understand why they're less common now.
> It was only by rethinking every layer of our infrastructure that we were able to pull Spotify off, to create that magic moment of double-clicking on a new song and having it instantly play. And speaking of magic …
This reminds me of a conference that John Carmack gave (in 2019?) where he goes over how [the occulus team] got input latency down to a manageable amount on modern hardware.
It's an interesting data point that both these efforts to produce "magic" required an in-depth "rethinking" of many of the underlying stack layers.
They spend some time interviewing Lars Ulrich of Metallica in the context of of the Napster lawsuit. He comes across in this interview as still upset at Napster for what they did, and he is at turns indignant and also emotionally wounded at the fact that they are perceived as the villains in the story. In particular he cannot seem to reconcile his belief that they, and I quote "are the most fan friendly band on this planet" with suing Napster for $100k per download in damages, a ludicrous and arrogant sum. I am not a Metallica fan and do not listen to their music (out of disinterest, not antifandom. Metal isn't my genre), but it is striking to me to see how 20 years on they still don't get it.