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There is a common element here. The original developer of uTorrent sold his product to BitTorrent and teamed up with the Spotify guys as the key engineer, and w

There is a common element here. The original developer of uTorrent sold his product to BitTorrent and teamed up with the Spotify guys as the key engineer, and was critical to the success of the early product. Ludvig is a badass. He's been one of my favorite programmers since the early uTorrent days. That's why Spotify was such a good product back in beta, he basically had control over everything technical. Thus the P2P approach to bootstrap their service (I didn't mind. It was actually a pretty cool solution to an engineering problem) and the use of pirated media to test the product. Ludvig helped create Spotify in an attempt to turn his love for P2P into an actual commercial product. Of course, Spotify sucks now and BitTorrent has mutilated uTorrent. I hope he leaves Spotify and starts a new project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus

charlesdm 9y ago
"Of course, Spotify sucks now". Spotify is awesome and convenient. In comparison to other services, for me as a user, it's a clear winner.
- kakarot 9y ago
  In comparison to the other garbage, yeah it might be the winner. But it's still garbage. I was one of the first users of the beta program. At the time, Ludvig's philosophy of simplicity + hidden functionality via interactive views shone through the UI and it was very pleasant to use. The 5 star rating system was the icing on the cake. A step down in functionality from Amarok's playlist creation system, and lacking the fine search and organization capabilities of foobar2000, but it did the job. However, the UX of Spotify has hideously morphed over time. Now the UI mostly uses Chromium Embedded Framework which brings huge overhead and causes lots of rendering latency. The font size and padding has grown, then shrunk, then grown again, each time showing less tracks on a page at once. Views that were once interactive with left and right clicks became static. Star ratings turned into Like/Unlike. Their user behavior tracking has naturally been cranked up to 11, though it is better than a lot of similar products, I still have no desire for a music service to track anything other than the music I search and play. Even tracking the song titles in my personal library is an unacceptable breach of privacy. The slow and steady social creep and tracking through Facebook is also unacceptable. It doesn't utilize P2P anymore, which I considered a plus because I love supporting and legitimizing P2P tech. It has become less of an engineer-led company and more of a traditional company with shareholder interests I could really go on. The downsides of Spotify as a music player are much greater than they were at product launch. The most infuriating thing about it is that Spotify never fielded these changes with users before committing to them, and each and every time when a simple addition to the settings panel could make the changes optional, they were instead forced upon us. I don't like a music player that frequently changes its UI without my approval. I like a music player that puts me in charge of the UI. I no longer pay for Spotify and have returned to getting my music through other means. On my Linux and Windows machines, I mostly use foobar2000 and VLC, and Amarok when I need powerful playlisting tools. If Radionomy ever gets their shit straight with Winamp (They bought it from AOL in '14 and have to clean out all proprietary code) then I will definitely consider going back. Give me a streaming service that doesn't spy on me unnecessarily and has an API so that I can implement a plugin to my favorite existing media player or otherwise an absolutely beautiful and immutable interface, and of course a large library and doesn't shaft its artists, and I will pay for it. Anything less than that, in 2017, sucks.
  - ionised 9y ago
    I started using Spotify Premium while I was travelling recently (stick to Foobar2000 at home) and the UI seems utterly counter-intuitive.

charlesdm 9y ago

"Of course, Spotify sucks now". Spotify is awesome and convenient. In comparison to other services, for me as a user, it's a clear winner.

kakarot 9y ago
In comparison to the other garbage, yeah it might be the winner. But it's still garbage. I was one of the first users of the beta program. At the time, Ludvig's philosophy of simplicity + hidden functionality via interactive views shone through the UI and it was very pleasant to use. The 5 star rating system was the icing on the cake. A step down in functionality from Amarok's playlist creation system, and lacking the fine search and organization capabilities of foobar2000, but it did the job. However, the UX of Spotify has hideously morphed over time. Now the UI mostly uses Chromium Embedded Framework which brings huge overhead and causes lots of rendering latency. The font size and padding has grown, then shrunk, then grown again, each time showing less tracks on a page at once. Views that were once interactive with left and right clicks became static. Star ratings turned into Like/Unlike. Their user behavior tracking has naturally been cranked up to 11, though it is better than a lot of similar products, I still have no desire for a music service to track anything other than the music I search and play. Even tracking the song titles in my personal library is an unacceptable breach of privacy. The slow and steady social creep and tracking through Facebook is also unacceptable. It doesn't utilize P2P anymore, which I considered a plus because I love supporting and legitimizing P2P tech. It has become less of an engineer-led company and more of a traditional company with shareholder interests I could really go on. The downsides of Spotify as a music player are much greater than they were at product launch. The most infuriating thing about it is that Spotify never fielded these changes with users before committing to them, and each and every time when a simple addition to the settings panel could make the changes optional, they were instead forced upon us. I don't like a music player that frequently changes its UI without my approval. I like a music player that puts me in charge of the UI. I no longer pay for Spotify and have returned to getting my music through other means. On my Linux and Windows machines, I mostly use foobar2000 and VLC, and Amarok when I need powerful playlisting tools. If Radionomy ever gets their shit straight with Winamp (They bought it from AOL in '14 and have to clean out all proprietary code) then I will definitely consider going back. Give me a streaming service that doesn't spy on me unnecessarily and has an API so that I can implement a plugin to my favorite existing media player or otherwise an absolutely beautiful and immutable interface, and of course a large library and doesn't shaft its artists, and I will pay for it. Anything less than that, in 2017, sucks.
- ionised 9y ago
  I started using Spotify Premium while I was travelling recently (stick to Foobar2000 at home) and the UI seems utterly counter-intuitive.