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Well, what will happen when Google Play Music (or Spotify or Apple Music's subscription store or...) inevitably announces a shutdown in 3 months? Spotify's bee

Well, what will happen when Google Play Music (or Spotify or Apple Music's subscription store or...) inevitably announces a shutdown in 3 months? Spotify's been running strong for like 13 years, GPM is about to turn 10, etc. None of those people have been bitten yet, and there's literally hundreds of millions of them.

monocasa 7y ago
Google Play Music/Spotify/Apple Music is next to free to run, it's basically just a CDN on their end. There's almost no user data that didn't come from user machines originally. Stadia has all the user data on the backend, _and_ is expensive to run since all the processing happens on their end too.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Reading spotify's most recent filing, there was an increase in its compute costs of ~25 million dollars in 3Q2019 when compared to 3Q2018, mentioned in a footnote. In other words, a compute cost increase of $100 million a year was a footnote. That was an increase of about 1.5% of their gross operating income. The full hosting costs are not public, but we're easily talking hundreds of millions a quarter. Practically free?
  - monocasa 7y ago
    So, an increase of about $1/yr/user? Including I'm sure all of the money they're wasting training half baked ML models? Yeah, that's pretty damn close to free. Now compare that to stadia which'll probably be dedicating high CPU and GPU to each logged in user, in addition to the low latency video compression hardware they're pretty much guaranteed to have?
conradfr 7y ago
Google Play Music IS shutting down. Anyday now ... probably in a year max. They say they won't until YouTube music has feature parity but I don't believe it. I may sound bitter ...
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > Google Play Music IS shutting down Well, sort of. But relevant to the original question posed: are users of GPM losing their suscribed content? No.
  - conradfr 7y ago
    Depends if the catalogs are the same or not (currently not) and if they allow to upload your music on YTM (currently not).

monocasa 7y ago

Google Play Music/Spotify/Apple Music is next to free to run, it's basically just a CDN on their end. There's almost no user data that didn't come from user machines originally. Stadia has all the user data on the backend, _and_ is expensive to run since all the processing happens on their end too.

joshuamorton 7y ago
Reading spotify's most recent filing, there was an increase in its compute costs of ~25 million dollars in 3Q2019 when compared to 3Q2018, mentioned in a footnote. In other words, a compute cost increase of $100 million a year was a footnote. That was an increase of about 1.5% of their gross operating income. The full hosting costs are not public, but we're easily talking hundreds of millions a quarter. Practically free?
- monocasa 7y ago
  So, an increase of about $1/yr/user? Including I'm sure all of the money they're wasting training half baked ML models? Yeah, that's pretty damn close to free. Now compare that to stadia which'll probably be dedicating high CPU and GPU to each logged in user, in addition to the low latency video compression hardware they're pretty much guaranteed to have?

conradfr 7y ago

Google Play Music IS shutting down. Anyday now ... probably in a year max. They say they won't until YouTube music has feature parity but I don't believe it. I may sound bitter ...

joshuamorton 7y ago
> Google Play Music IS shutting down Well, sort of. But relevant to the original question posed: are users of GPM losing their suscribed content? No.
- conradfr 7y ago
  Depends if the catalogs are the same or not (currently not) and if they allow to upload your music on YTM (currently not).