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> It's like audio streaming, the most ineffective form of audio distribution, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. You dismissed it a bit too fast, didn

> It's like audio streaming, the most ineffective form of audio distribution, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. You dismissed it a bit too fast, didn't you? People are listening to streaming music everywhere - it is the new default. Even traditional radios stream over the internet. Is it efficient? Hell no. Is it popular? Extremely, even though a part of the population (including me!) prefers alternatives.

surfingdino 2y ago
You are ignoring one important factor, streaming services can only stream what they are allowed to and if the artists and their labels decide to use a different distribution channel, streaming will become a thing of the past. Spotify has reached the point where they no longer know what to do and will soon be replaced by a competitor, not necessarily one that's streaming audio.
- puppycodes 2y ago
  http://radio.garden/ http://radio.garden/
puppycodes 2y ago
I agree, but im curious what you mean by it not being efficient? Is it not entirely dependent on how we interact with audio? Like you said its extremely popular, but its popular because its the most efficient way to listen to audio in the way people want too... discovering stuff, playing that track you heard at a party but don't know what its called... etc
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
  I worked for a project that was a kind of mix of Netflix and Audible, just a few orders of magnitude smaller. Earlier, we were selling these multimedia products as digital downloads. That was simple for both sides, but with increased numbers of products and their weights customers started to complain their iPads etc. don't have enough storage to keep them (basically they would delete them and then request a new download link...). But the amount of things you need to deal with in the subscription model is huge. Everybody expects Netflix-like experience, instantaneous playback and searching etc. We can do that for N simultaneous streams; for more we need to add a slight delay - and that is noticeable. In any case, the same file is streamed multiple times, sometimes dozens of times a day for the same client. This is what I mean terribly inefficient. And although you can probably cache a few audio files, it doesn't work well for videos. From my point of view someone just wastes the bandwidth for not having to store a file locally. Yes I know this is how it is supposed to work, but still.

surfingdino 2y ago

You are ignoring one important factor, streaming services can only stream what they are allowed to and if the artists and their labels decide to use a different distribution channel, streaming will become a thing of the past. Spotify has reached the point where they no longer know what to do and will soon be replaced by a competitor, not necessarily one that's streaming audio.

puppycodes 2y ago
http://radio.garden/ http://radio.garden/

puppycodes 2y ago

I agree, but im curious what you mean by it not being efficient? Is it not entirely dependent on how we interact with audio? Like you said its extremely popular, but its popular because its the most efficient way to listen to audio in the way people want too... discovering stuff, playing that track you heard at a party but don't know what its called... etc

dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
I worked for a project that was a kind of mix of Netflix and Audible, just a few orders of magnitude smaller. Earlier, we were selling these multimedia products as digital downloads. That was simple for both sides, but with increased numbers of products and their weights customers started to complain their iPads etc. don't have enough storage to keep them (basically they would delete them and then request a new download link...). But the amount of things you need to deal with in the subscription model is huge. Everybody expects Netflix-like experience, instantaneous playback and searching etc. We can do that for N simultaneous streams; for more we need to add a slight delay - and that is noticeable. In any case, the same file is streamed multiple times, sometimes dozens of times a day for the same client. This is what I mean terribly inefficient. And although you can probably cache a few audio files, it doesn't work well for videos. From my point of view someone just wastes the bandwidth for not having to store a file locally. Yes I know this is how it is supposed to work, but still.