6 ms·

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing dev

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

javajosh 4y ago
You're right, baby scifi Josh wanted this, got it, and somehow, violating all expectations, it sucked. It happens.
- mindslight 4y ago
  The difference is who controls the software, and ultimately what their incentives are. Back then, you imagined the software serving you - details you hadn't thought of were to be be fleshed out in a way that made sense to you, to serve your interests. Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.
caymanjim 4y ago
And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Um, what? I mean, sure wired $15 earbuds exist that sound amazing, but their existence does NOT preclude the existence of terrible earbuds, especially of the BT variety.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    Err, no? I have a pair of cheap airpod imitation, best selling on Amazon with 4 stars (and reviews looked REAL), and they suck so hard that I had better quality with my walkman copy with its earbuds in 1988.
- criley2 4y ago
  Audio quality was garbage then too. We have rose-tinted memories of people with hundreds-then thousands-now worth of audio equipment. The average tin can radio in a car or in your house in the 80s was so comically bad compared to now that you'd think it was anachronistically bad. Frankly phones sound better than those cars LOL For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted up, you can still get glorious audio today.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Audio quality was garbage then too. Not as bad as you might suppose. My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far from audiophiles. The key is the right media for the right device. When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is where it sounds best. But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end player, and vice-versa. She will only listen to cassettes — new or old — on the 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear just sounds better. More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better word.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers It’s crazy how bad these are, they manage to ruin a lot of great songs.
mahogany 4y ago
> I can access basically every song ever recorded Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time. Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono version. Spotify is a mediocre experience at best for music nerds, which is probably what the person you're responding to is (has an amp and speakers, vinyl, etc).
- dendriti 4y ago
  How does this work for you then: Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Youtube does for the rest of us
  - dreamcompiler 4y ago
    That's very true but so is Sturgeon's law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
  - mahogany 4y ago
    Yeah, you're right in that sense. Honestly my post is a little over-dramatic because I'm venting based on these experiences I've had with Spotify. Overall, it does offer a lot and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.
  - mftb 4y ago
    Poorly. Quantity may be a quality all it's own, but that quality is poor. There is a lot of music that is not on Spotify, while other music is there but only inferior versions.
- 4y ago
Gigachad 4y ago
Dystopia is when I have to use electron and a slightly inconvenient UI. HN users must have pretty comfy lives.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  well, most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year, so their expectations and concerns must be different
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year Is that really the case? Anecdotally I'm earning 50k in EU.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - bbkane 4y ago
      There's a previous post/survey about where HN readers are located. A large amount are in California (me included). The Bay Area in particular does pay > $100k for most tech jobs. That said, taxes are so high and real estate here is so expensive that it's really hard to get a place you own.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  isn't that.. exactly what a dystopia is? The archetypical dystopia is superficially utopian, often driven by tech progress and excess of comfort. They're not torturing people in cages in Brave New World, they're giving them too much Soma
  - breakfastduck 4y ago
    People tend to get confused between a dystopia and a post apocalyptic wasteland
mrandish 4y ago
> I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button Yes, but the OP's point is that it's not really at the "click of a button" because the search appears designed specifically to make it easy to find playlists of songs but not individual songs (likely for royalty reduction reasons). When I was a kid, I naively imagined when I was in my 50s, as I am now, we'd be much closer to many of the visions of future painted in media from Popular Mechanics magazine to science fiction. Today, I understand and accept why we don't have the proverbial "flying cars", but I am disappointed when stuff we already recently had (and could easily still have) is unavailable for bad reasons. As a technologist, I find this especially frustrating.
superjan 4y ago
The dystopian part is that all of the modern centralized services tend to evolve in spying and manipulating wannabe monopolists.
tomc1985 4y ago
Yeah but I don't care about 99.9% of that, and a lot of that other 0.1% isn't even on Spotify. You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and if you do they'll kick you out. "Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to strip you of ownership of your media. To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of Netflix?

javajosh 4y ago

You're right, baby scifi Josh wanted this, got it, and somehow, violating all expectations, it sucked. It happens.

mindslight 4y ago
The difference is who controls the software, and ultimately what their incentives are. Back then, you imagined the software serving you - details you hadn't thought of were to be be fleshed out in a way that made sense to you, to serve your interests. Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.

caymanjim 4y ago

And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.

jstummbillig 4y ago
You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Um, what? I mean, sure wired $15 earbuds exist that sound amazing, but their existence does NOT preclude the existence of terrible earbuds, especially of the BT variety.
- darkwater 4y ago
  Err, no? I have a pair of cheap airpod imitation, best selling on Amazon with 4 stars (and reviews looked REAL), and they suck so hard that I had better quality with my walkman copy with its earbuds in 1988.
criley2 4y ago
Audio quality was garbage then too. We have rose-tinted memories of people with hundreds-then thousands-now worth of audio equipment. The average tin can radio in a car or in your house in the 80s was so comically bad compared to now that you'd think it was anachronistically bad. Frankly phones sound better than those cars LOL For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted up, you can still get glorious audio today.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Audio quality was garbage then too. Not as bad as you might suppose. My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far from audiophiles. The key is the right media for the right device. When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is where it sounds best. But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end player, and vice-versa. She will only listen to cassettes — new or old — on the 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear just sounds better. More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better word.
the_only_law 4y ago
> Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers It’s crazy how bad these are, they manage to ruin a lot of great songs.

mahogany 4y ago

> I can access basically every song ever recorded Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time. Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono version. Spotify is a mediocre experience at best for music nerds, which is probably what the person you're responding to is (has an amp and speakers, vinyl, etc).

dendriti 4y ago
How does this work for you then: Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Youtube does for the rest of us
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  That's very true but so is Sturgeon's law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- mahogany 4y ago
  Yeah, you're right in that sense. Honestly my post is a little over-dramatic because I'm venting based on these experiences I've had with Spotify. Overall, it does offer a lot and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.
- mftb 4y ago
  Poorly. Quantity may be a quality all it's own, but that quality is poor. There is a lot of music that is not on Spotify, while other music is there but only inferior versions.
4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago

Dystopia is when I have to use electron and a slightly inconvenient UI. HN users must have pretty comfy lives.

behnamoh 4y ago
well, most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year, so their expectations and concerns must be different
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >most are earning hundreds of $1000 a year Is that really the case? Anecdotally I'm earning 50k in EU.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bbkane 4y ago
    There's a previous post/survey about where HN readers are located. A large amount are in California (me included). The Bay Area in particular does pay > $100k for most tech jobs. That said, taxes are so high and real estate here is so expensive that it's really hard to get a place you own.
Barrin92 4y ago
isn't that.. exactly what a dystopia is? The archetypical dystopia is superficially utopian, often driven by tech progress and excess of comfort. They're not torturing people in cages in Brave New World, they're giving them too much Soma
- breakfastduck 4y ago
  People tend to get confused between a dystopia and a post apocalyptic wasteland

mrandish 4y ago

> I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button Yes, but the OP's point is that it's not really at the "click of a button" because the search appears designed specifically to make it easy to find playlists of songs but not individual songs (likely for royalty reduction reasons). When I was a kid, I naively imagined when I was in my 50s, as I am now, we'd be much closer to many of the visions of future painted in media from Popular Mechanics magazine to science fiction. Today, I understand and accept why we don't have the proverbial "flying cars", but I am disappointed when stuff we already recently had (and could easily still have) is unavailable for bad reasons. As a technologist, I find this especially frustrating.

superjan 4y ago

The dystopian part is that all of the modern centralized services tend to evolve in spying and manipulating wannabe monopolists.

tomc1985 4y ago

Yeah but I don't care about 99.9% of that, and a lot of that other 0.1% isn't even on Spotify. You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and if you do they'll kick you out. "Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to strip you of ownership of your media. To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of Netflix?