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0 pointscess115mo ago0 comments

No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".

The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.

After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.

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ninjin5mo ago

Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.

grvbck5mo ago

When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ".

Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.

cess11OP5mo ago

Yes, when the entertainment industry came onboard they immediately made the service much worse. I reacted the same way you did.

IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.

dehrmann5mo ago

> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.

Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.

The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.

cess11OP5mo ago

If you don't remember, why speculate?

Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.

They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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ninjin5mo ago

grvbck5mo ago

When I first started using Spotify, a lot of the tracks in my playlists had titles like "Pearl Jam - Even Flow_128_mp3_encoded_by_SHiLlaZZ".

Always made me chuckle, it looked like they had copied half of their catalogue from the pirate bay. It took them a few years to clean that up.

cess11OP5mo ago

Yes, when the entertainment industry came onboard they immediately made the service much worse. I reacted the same way you did.

IIRC, 2008, a little less than twenty years.

dehrmann5mo ago

> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.

cess11OP5mo ago

If you don't remember, why speculate?

They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse