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This doesn't shock me at all. I recall a while back reading how Spotify allegedly started their service with downloads from The Pirate Bay: https://torrentfrea

This doesn't shock me at all. I recall a while back reading how Spotify allegedly started their service with downloads from The Pirate Bay: https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files-some-from-pirate-bay-170509/ https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

cbhl 9y ago
Spotify cleaned up a lot in 2014. They used to be peer-to-peer, and they'd give "free" service to employees of certain big tech companies because they could take advantage of the upload bandwidth of the big tech offices. They culled the P2P tech in 2014 and went to a standard server-client model. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-peer-technology-from-its-desktop-client/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  It's sad to see that peer to peer is not utilized more, since it scales so well. The overbearing copyright propaganda has given BitTorrent a bad name, even though it has so many other uses.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    It scales really well for the owner of the service... it does not scale really well for the internet as a whole (sadly).
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      How so? There only issue I can think of is upload speed, which is improving for many, and would improve more prevalently if more average users had a clear need.
      - schoen 9y ago
        The original BitTorrent wasn't aware of network topology at all, so it could randomly use a relatively expensive or congested link just as easily as a LAN connection. You could get better use of network resources overall if you usually preferred to get pieces from peers that are closer to you on the network. I think the BitTorrent company and/or community were studying this issue at some point and so they may have come up with alternative algorithms that prefer at least AS-locality or something. As an extreme case, imagine that there are two seeds, one being another computer on your LAN and another being a host in Timor-Leste (which at one point in the 2000s reportedly had a single T1 connection for the entire country). It will be nicer for you and for the Timorese if you can somehow arrange to simply download the file from your LAN seed. Here's one example of someone trying to improve this property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT
        thomastjeffery 9y ago
        I would argue that in the long run, it is better to demand more bandwidth than is available, so that infrastructure builders can react accordingly.
        schoen 9y ago
        I like the overprovisioning concept fine, but it's going to be pretty expensive to overprovision for the possibility of high-speed connections between all random pairs of hosts everywhere in the world regardless of geography. We'll probably have to persuade a lot more people to value this degree of connectivity ideologically, because demand for it isn't really getting expressed much right now. I don't want to sound like a Bellhead here, but the packet switching infrastructure that's been built out has embodied some assumptions about its likely patterns of use. To change those patterns of use a lot (which I'd like to see too) probably needs more infrastructure. Even things like ADSL are a problem here. I agree that path asymmetry doesn't feel at all healthy for the Internet -- it feels like it's baking in producer and consumer roles -- but there are a few counterarguments that may give us some pause: * It's never been cheaper for people who specifically want to provide services to others to rent servers in colocation facilities. It's getting cheaper every year. So, maybe people who care to do so could just rent some servers. (Of course, this might give them less autonomy because there are more people who can decide to kick them off or shut them down, and they might still not have the infrastructure to distribute media that they produce at home to the servers they rent. On the other hand, running things at home may make anonymous publishing harder because the associated broadband service is usually tied to a physical address by the ISP.) * There's never been a huge amount of expressed demand for symmetric network connections, even when they've been available as an option. (Maybe this is different in different countries?) The economic division of network operators into "eyeball networks" (major net traffic sinks) and "provider networks" (major net traffic sources) seems to be getting sharper over time. The network operators themselves might have an economic incentive to try to get their users to equalize the traffic in both directions -- especially in terms of arrangements around settlement-free peering -- but they haven't managed to change most users' habits very much this way. * I think of myself as a very pro-decentralization Internet user, yet whenever I run "ifconfig wlan0 | grep bytes", my download volumes consistently dramatically outpace my upload volumes, even though I have a symmetric broadband connection both at home and at work! So apparently I'm not being the change I want to see in the world.
    - lrem 9y ago
      No. As someone whose PhD touched this: it is actually ok because it stabilises towards using the most available paths. As someone who set this up at an ISP: you can QoS the hell out of P2P and keep everyone happy. That's unless you tried blocking it and now find yourself in a stupid arms war, against folks with more free time than yourself.
  - lathiat 9y ago
    I get the feeling that a lot of p2p efforts fail because of patents. For example I understand the reason Facetime calls don't go phone-to-phone and instead go through a server is because of a patent [troll]. I'm curious to see how WebRTC fits into that.
    - seanalltogether 9y ago
      I think that was more a lesson from observing the problems with Skype and other video conferencing software. P2P video is great when everything is one on one, start adding in additional people and the whole experience grinds to a stuttering pixelated mess.
      - thomastjeffery 9y ago
        That's for small scale real-time. P2P scales great at a slightly larger scale, especially with larger chunks of data.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    It doesn't scale well. It saturates the upload bandwidth and grinds the connection to a halt. It ruins the internet for the entire family or office. Office sysadmins will block the software and start a witch hunt once they realize the problem. Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      > It doesn't scale well in every circumstance. Just because ISPs love to skimp on upload speed does not mean that it is reasonable to do so. Infrastructure is reactionary. If users need more upload speed, they will pay for it, and ISPs will update the infrastructure accordingly. > Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible. That's another arbitrary issue caused by overbearing ISPs. There is an awful lot that people would be able to do if they had reasonable control over their ports. ISPs - especially the 6 massive incumbents - build the absolute minimum infrastructure they can get away with. That is simply their fiscal incentive. We shouldn't be afraid to give them new incentives.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    p2p does not work on mobile. That is, it work, but it drains data plans. That’s the only reason companies give up on p2p.
Insanity 9y ago
Though that was from a beta and in an unsure time of how the service would turn out. Just because a service starts by doing dubious things, does not mean it will continue doing so.
- croon 9y ago
  I got in post-beta, but invite-only free version in 2008, and I remember it having a lot of albums where names of which were still scene releases because (I presume) the parsing was off. I also remember specific releases having audio compression artefacts matching what I streamed from Spotify. They replaced everything in phases, because I remember all the URI:s to songs kept breaking in my playlists before they implemented auto-matching of your songs to new location once a specific album was rendered unavailable. No affiliation to Spotify, just a long time user.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Which is evidence that copyright hold back innovation.
- mehly 9y ago
  Said no music artist ever.
  - whiddershins 9y ago
    Upvoted because I agree with the sentiment but also not true. Look at how the interpretation of copyright as it pertains to sampling and mashing etc absolutely stifled innovation and continues to do so. For visual art look at how ambiguous the law is around collage, which definitely stifles innovation.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      It's simply nonsense to claim that sampling and mashups have been stifled by copyright law. Ignoring a few ancient parody/satire acts like Negativland, samples are made, used, cleared, and paid for with no serious negative consequences. Likewise remixes. There's some extra paperwork, money changes hands, and on the whole everyone is happy. What's been far more damaging is Spotify's insanely exploitative model, which sees its officers making millions while the artists who provide the content get pocket change - if that.
      - thomastjeffery 9y ago
        > Spotify's insanely exploitative model, which sees its officers making millions while the artists who provide the content get pocket change - if that. That's not just Spotify's model; it's music labels' model.
      - dmitriid 9y ago
        Spotify would gladly pay the artists all the money and it could. And it can’t. Precisely because of copyright laws: you end up paying the labels, not the artists.
adamnemecek 9y ago
The CEO is a former CEO of BitTorrent.com.
- AndrewWarner 9y ago
  Do you mean uTorrent? Seems he headed that until it was sold to BitTorrent Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek
  - hsjoberg 9y ago
    The guy is who made utorrent also works for spotify
oceanghost 9y ago
It is my belief that their library was in some portion built by exflitrating data from user's computers. I have an enormous collection of lossless audio and noticed it using lots of bandwidth. The desktop versions insist on loading when the machine boots, and use subsantial amounts of bandwidth/memory at idle.
- underwater 9y ago
  Spotify uses (or used?) peer to peer technology for streaming.
  - chx 9y ago
    Long ago, removed almost four years ago. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-peer-technology-from-its-desktop-client/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
- ploxiln 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's just the absurd inefficiency of today's trendy software. I've also long shunned the spotify "deskop apps" and stuck to the website because firefox can contain the damage a bit, and ublock origin can make a surprising difference in the cpu usage of spotify! The ads are crazy javascript sometimes, and I'm guessing the same crap is loaded into the desktop electron apps.
  - oceanghost 9y ago
    Nah. This was the desktop app long before the web app existed. To this day it still uses absurd amounts of disk space / ram.
nailer 9y ago
You wouldn't do that, to build and test and demo your app, while your lawyers negotiate forever for rights?

cbhl 9y ago

Spotify cleaned up a lot in 2014. They used to be peer-to-peer, and they'd give "free" service to employees of certain big tech companies because they could take advantage of the upload bandwidth of the big tech offices. They culled the P2P tech in 2014 and went to a standard server-client model. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-peer-technology-from-its-desktop-client/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...

thomastjeffery 9y ago
It's sad to see that peer to peer is not utilized more, since it scales so well. The overbearing copyright propaganda has given BitTorrent a bad name, even though it has so many other uses.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  It scales really well for the owner of the service... it does not scale really well for the internet as a whole (sadly).
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    How so? There only issue I can think of is upload speed, which is improving for many, and would improve more prevalently if more average users had a clear need.
    - schoen 9y ago
      The original BitTorrent wasn't aware of network topology at all, so it could randomly use a relatively expensive or congested link just as easily as a LAN connection. You could get better use of network resources overall if you usually preferred to get pieces from peers that are closer to you on the network. I think the BitTorrent company and/or community were studying this issue at some point and so they may have come up with alternative algorithms that prefer at least AS-locality or something. As an extreme case, imagine that there are two seeds, one being another computer on your LAN and another being a host in Timor-Leste (which at one point in the 2000s reportedly had a single T1 connection for the entire country). It will be nicer for you and for the Timorese if you can somehow arrange to simply download the file from your LAN seed. Here's one example of someone trying to improve this property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopBT
      - thomastjeffery 9y ago
        I would argue that in the long run, it is better to demand more bandwidth than is available, so that infrastructure builders can react accordingly.
        schoen 9y ago
        I like the overprovisioning concept fine, but it's going to be pretty expensive to overprovision for the possibility of high-speed connections between all random pairs of hosts everywhere in the world regardless of geography. We'll probably have to persuade a lot more people to value this degree of connectivity ideologically, because demand for it isn't really getting expressed much right now. I don't want to sound like a Bellhead here, but the packet switching infrastructure that's been built out has embodied some assumptions about its likely patterns of use. To change those patterns of use a lot (which I'd like to see too) probably needs more infrastructure. Even things like ADSL are a problem here. I agree that path asymmetry doesn't feel at all healthy for the Internet -- it feels like it's baking in producer and consumer roles -- but there are a few counterarguments that may give us some pause: * It's never been cheaper for people who specifically want to provide services to others to rent servers in colocation facilities. It's getting cheaper every year. So, maybe people who care to do so could just rent some servers. (Of course, this might give them less autonomy because there are more people who can decide to kick them off or shut them down, and they might still not have the infrastructure to distribute media that they produce at home to the servers they rent. On the other hand, running things at home may make anonymous publishing harder because the associated broadband service is usually tied to a physical address by the ISP.) * There's never been a huge amount of expressed demand for symmetric network connections, even when they've been available as an option. (Maybe this is different in different countries?) The economic division of network operators into "eyeball networks" (major net traffic sinks) and "provider networks" (major net traffic sources) seems to be getting sharper over time. The network operators themselves might have an economic incentive to try to get their users to equalize the traffic in both directions -- especially in terms of arrangements around settlement-free peering -- but they haven't managed to change most users' habits very much this way. * I think of myself as a very pro-decentralization Internet user, yet whenever I run "ifconfig wlan0 | grep bytes", my download volumes consistently dramatically outpace my upload volumes, even though I have a symmetric broadband connection both at home and at work! So apparently I'm not being the change I want to see in the world.
  - lrem 9y ago
    No. As someone whose PhD touched this: it is actually ok because it stabilises towards using the most available paths. As someone who set this up at an ISP: you can QoS the hell out of P2P and keep everyone happy. That's unless you tried blocking it and now find yourself in a stupid arms war, against folks with more free time than yourself.
- lathiat 9y ago
  I get the feeling that a lot of p2p efforts fail because of patents. For example I understand the reason Facetime calls don't go phone-to-phone and instead go through a server is because of a patent [troll]. I'm curious to see how WebRTC fits into that.
  - seanalltogether 9y ago
    I think that was more a lesson from observing the problems with Skype and other video conferencing software. P2P video is great when everything is one on one, start adding in additional people and the whole experience grinds to a stuttering pixelated mess.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      That's for small scale real-time. P2P scales great at a slightly larger scale, especially with larger chunks of data.
- user5994461 9y ago
  It doesn't scale well. It saturates the upload bandwidth and grinds the connection to a halt. It ruins the internet for the entire family or office. Office sysadmins will block the software and start a witch hunt once they realize the problem. Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    > It doesn't scale well in every circumstance. Just because ISPs love to skimp on upload speed does not mean that it is reasonable to do so. Infrastructure is reactionary. If users need more upload speed, they will pay for it, and ISPs will update the infrastructure accordingly. > Also, connecting doesn't work with NAT, carrier grade NAT and firewalls. They need a client-server model with a server that is accessible. That's another arbitrary issue caused by overbearing ISPs. There is an awful lot that people would be able to do if they had reasonable control over their ports. ISPs - especially the 6 massive incumbents - build the absolute minimum infrastructure they can get away with. That is simply their fiscal incentive. We shouldn't be afraid to give them new incentives.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  p2p does not work on mobile. That is, it work, but it drains data plans. That’s the only reason companies give up on p2p.

Insanity 9y ago

Though that was from a beta and in an unsure time of how the service would turn out. Just because a service starts by doing dubious things, does not mean it will continue doing so.

croon 9y ago
I got in post-beta, but invite-only free version in 2008, and I remember it having a lot of albums where names of which were still scene releases because (I presume) the parsing was off. I also remember specific releases having audio compression artefacts matching what I streamed from Spotify. They replaced everything in phases, because I remember all the URI:s to songs kept breaking in my playlists before they implemented auto-matching of your songs to new location once a specific album was rendered unavailable. No affiliation to Spotify, just a long time user.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Which is evidence that copyright hold back innovation.

mehly 9y ago
Said no music artist ever.
- whiddershins 9y ago
  Upvoted because I agree with the sentiment but also not true. Look at how the interpretation of copyright as it pertains to sampling and mashing etc absolutely stifled innovation and continues to do so. For visual art look at how ambiguous the law is around collage, which definitely stifles innovation.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    It's simply nonsense to claim that sampling and mashups have been stifled by copyright law. Ignoring a few ancient parody/satire acts like Negativland, samples are made, used, cleared, and paid for with no serious negative consequences. Likewise remixes. There's some extra paperwork, money changes hands, and on the whole everyone is happy. What's been far more damaging is Spotify's insanely exploitative model, which sees its officers making millions while the artists who provide the content get pocket change - if that.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      > Spotify's insanely exploitative model, which sees its officers making millions while the artists who provide the content get pocket change - if that. That's not just Spotify's model; it's music labels' model.
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      Spotify would gladly pay the artists all the money and it could. And it can’t. Precisely because of copyright laws: you end up paying the labels, not the artists.

adamnemecek 9y ago

The CEO is a former CEO of BitTorrent.com.

AndrewWarner 9y ago
Do you mean uTorrent? Seems he headed that until it was sold to BitTorrent Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek
- hsjoberg 9y ago
  The guy is who made utorrent also works for spotify

oceanghost 9y ago

It is my belief that their library was in some portion built by exflitrating data from user's computers. I have an enormous collection of lossless audio and noticed it using lots of bandwidth. The desktop versions insist on loading when the machine boots, and use subsantial amounts of bandwidth/memory at idle.

underwater 9y ago
Spotify uses (or used?) peer to peer technology for streaming.
- chx 9y ago
  Long ago, removed almost four years ago. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-peer-technology-from-its-desktop-client/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
ploxiln 9y ago
I'm pretty sure that's just the absurd inefficiency of today's trendy software. I've also long shunned the spotify "deskop apps" and stuck to the website because firefox can contain the damage a bit, and ublock origin can make a surprising difference in the cpu usage of spotify! The ads are crazy javascript sometimes, and I'm guessing the same crap is loaded into the desktop electron apps.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  Nah. This was the desktop app long before the web app existed. To this day it still uses absurd amounts of disk space / ram.

nailer 9y ago

You wouldn't do that, to build and test and demo your app, while your lawyers negotiate forever for rights?