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Spotify's Beta Used 'Pirate' MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay (2017)
- gnabgib 2y ago(2017) Discussion at the time (123 points, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14307986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14307986
- LeoPanthera 2y agoIf they were paying the labels, does it matter?
- lmm 2y agoMaybe. If RIAA subcontractors were downloading those files, then that would seem to undermine the argument that the people uploading them were doing so without proper authorisation.
- do_not_redeem 2y agoIf I buy a CD, am I then allowed to pirate the mp3s? I think the RIAA would say no.
- LoFiSamurai 2y agoWhy not? You could also just rip the CD
- do_not_redeem 2y agoThat's my opinion too, but I don't think the RIAA or MPAA would agree.
- felizuno 2y agoWhen I worked with Rdio the RIAA sued them because users would make playlists named "Now that's what I call music < X >" with the same songs as the CDs. All the songs were fully licensed to be streamed on the service. The RIAA won those lawsuits. edit: they might have actually settled, but the RIAA got what they wanted with no concessions
- somenameforme 2y agoDid the RIAA win or Rdio settle? The RIAA doesn't seem to have a very good track record in cases that go to court, but the whole 'we're gonna sue you for eleventy billion dollars and destroy your life with our thousands of lawyers, but give us $20 right now and we'll call it even' seems to be quite effective.
- felizuno 2y agoYou know, you might be right that in the end it was a settlement of sorts. I remember for a while they were fighting it specifically because it was about playlists (named groups of songs) which was not defined in the licensing in a way that clearly did or did not overlap with albums. The more I think about it, there was such a threat of refusing to renew licenses that it's possible they renewed with explicit language that prevented these playlists. I know for sure the playlists were purged. All said it was a hilarious amount of lawyer money over some of the dumbest CDs ever.
- geon 2y agoThat’s a clear trademark violation though.
- kzrdude 2y agoThat sounds exactly like what youtube music does
- snackernews 2y agoI miss Rdio. Always thought it had the better UI and recommendations.
- gruez 2y agoNeither the RIAA or the MPAA have enforcement powers. Their positions are irrelevant.
- Retric 2y agoThe basis of copyright in the US is that being able to sue and win is an enforcement power. That’s the core thing the government is giving copyright holders, and what the public is protected from when something enters the public domain.
- noirbot 2y agoThey have enforcement powers if they they prevail in the suit and the people who have legal power enforce their will. Which is something that has happened in the past. That includes them just successfully abusing the defendant into settling, no matter if they would have won in the long run. The RIAA clearly has the power to enforce economic harm on anyone who has to defend their lawsuits. Against small enough defendants, that makes their positions extremely relevant.
- gruez 2y agoAnyone can sue anyone. Just because they think something is illegal, doesn't mean it's actually illegal. They still need to convince a judge. Therefore their stance on whether you can rip CDs is irrelevant.
- Retric 2y agoLawsuits only get expensive when they can’t instantly be dismissed. If I sue you for something ridiculous like using telepathic mind control to get my dog to bark satanic messages, the judge will just dismiss the case pre trial. If you launch a bunch of such frivolous lawsuits I can get a lawyer to counter sue you and win on contingency with zero out of pocket expenses.
- card_zero 2y agoThey're disagreeable across the board.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- acomjean 2y agoI use this “Apple match” service with iTunes. I think the idea was it found songs from cds I ripped and served me the same song from the cloud(without uploading) for a small yearly fee. Though it did spend a long time uploading but I have a few phish concerts and a huge amount of classical I bought (Deutche Gramaphone has a best of collection they sold direct that was pretty big) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_lockers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_l... “by Apple (and formerly Amazon.com) was "scan-and-match", which examined music files on a computer and added a copy of matched tracks to the user's music locker without having to upload the files.” Don’t know how much longer this will last.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoThis service still exists, and you can even still pay for it separately, but it's also included with Apple Music.
- lloeki 2y agoNote that there are two different matching products: - iTunes Match: matches files by audio fingerprint and gives you 256k AAC unDRM'd files. If it doesn't match, uploads files to "iTunes in the Cloud" digital locker feature (files may be converted to AAC prior to uploading). Costs in the order of 20-ish € a year. - Apple Music: matches files by audio fingerprint and gives you 256k AAC FairPlay-protected files. Can't recall if it uploads (I think it does?) and how it converts (might convert to FairPlay protected?). Both have song count limit (10k or something for iTunes in the Cloud), and they may differ (not sure, Apple Music may be higher). If you have both, iTunes Match applies.
- llm_trw 2y agoYou can if you do it on radio. You don't pay for the physical medium, you pay for the right to play the song to other people.
- jszymborski 2y agoThat's the right to play the music, but you received it through illicit distribution which, depending on jurisdiction, can result in liability.
- lloeki 2y agoYou're being downvoted, but you're correct: bits can have (legal) colour. As I recall this is the case in France: even if you own a CD, getting a bit-for-bit copy of it that was originally produced unlawfully runs afoul of reproduction rights. IIRC this was even challenged and confirmed in court. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23/ https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23/
- jimbob45 2y agoThe RIAA only cares about seeding, not leeching/DLing.
- chgs 2y agoDepends entirely on your definition of the word pirate and the jurisdiction you are in.
- triceratops 2y agoIf you have a CD and a license to stream the CD, it's going to be hard for the licensee to sue you for streaming a rip of the CD instead of getting a copy directly from them.
- qotgalaxy 2y ago[dead]
- qingcharles 2y agoProbably not. When I was doing audio ingestion for the major labels 1999-2004 it was all from CD. Some CDs (*cough* Sony *cough*) had such fucked-up shit to try and stop ripping it was easier just to source the files from audiogalaxy.
- stavros 2y agoCouldn't EAC just bypass all that? I don't remember owning a CD it couldn't rip.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoIt depended far more on what optical drive you had than on what software you used.
- bobloblaw22 2y ago[flagged]
- pockmarked19 2y agoHere is my comment from earlier regarding this very thing, and it seems like one of these is incorrect? Who can tell me the truth?! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972523
- steezeburger 2y agoWow I did not know the Spotify dudes came from torrent tech
- bobsmooth 2y agoIsn't this common knowledge? All the big companies got their start either through theft or copyright infringement.
- Sabinus 2y agoIt's even a pattern in normal business. Crime families or individuals will acquire enough capital from crime to go (mostly) legit and then they transfer to running normal business. Short term high risk to get the seed money, then long term traditional business income and stability.
- bobloblaw22 2y ago[flagged]
- b3lvedere 2y agoThe Mafia model?
- lurk2 2y agoQuite common in Mexico and South America more broadly. It's quite typical that a middle-aged rancher or corrupt police officer sees an opportunity to make some extra money, scales it, and then finds himself at the center of a criminal enterprise with so much money that he ends up going back into legitimate business. Hospitality and agriculture (specifically tree fruits like avocado) are the big ones in Mexico. In Colombia it's emerald mining, pharmaceuticals, and ranching.
- reaperman 2y agoCrunchyroll was first launched as an anime pirating site, and even received venture capital funding while it still allowed uploads of unlicensed content to the site.
- bad_user 2y agoDoes it matter? I am concerned about the periodic attacks on Spotify, while the elephant in the room, YouTube, escapes unfettered. Everything from artist royalties to hosting the Joe Rogan show. And as it happens, Spotify isn't a FAANG or a US company, so isn't that convenient?
- the-grump 2y agoBurn Spotify to the ground.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoYeah, it ads to a pattern of zero morals/ethics/standards. As someone whose mother was harassed for wearing a mask (she was dying of cancer during COVID) I will forever hate Spotify and Joe Rogan. And I'm a hippie live and let type. But I actively hate those two. But enjoy your fake Spotify created muzak and algo optimized to the lowest royalty payout not your music tastes all while supporting Joe boy (leader of the last 250 comics).
- bad_user 2y agoExactly what I said. So you're OK with YouTube hosting Joe Rogan while they also maintain a monopoly and not giving a damn in general, because they are too big for that. https://www.youtube.com/@joerogan https://www.youtube.com/@joerogan Tell me, how does that work out for you?
- bobloblaw22 2y ago[flagged]
- chgs 2y agoThey’re pointing out the hypocrisy and it’s a solid point. The correct challenge to this “Joe fogan” person is it seems Spotify spent a lot of money on an exclusive contract. That’s different to alllowing someone to use your platform. YouTube didn’t pay him millions to be on their platform, at least from what I can tell. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52736364 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52736364
- ninjin 2y agoHad alpha access and can confirm that this was the case. Also stated it a few years ago [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556181 Many of the early core developers were my seniors at university and the story I heard was that the early Spotify music collection was the superset of the staff's personal music collections. It was great, but once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since. One anecdote that I have not stated before. In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user. Not sure how remarkable this is these days with Wine becoming so much more powerful, but it absolutely was in 2008. I also remember sitting in the university staff lounge with some of said seniors and trying to mentally reverse engineer their implementation. Got most of it right; it was great fun and I owe said seniors a lot for "uplifting" me intellectually back in those days. Truly great people.
- touristtam 2y ago> once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since I've had a similar experience where Spotify lost the license for some of the music I was listening the most at the time. That definitely broke the spell early on.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 2y agoI sub to tidal so I can download the music. I have stopped giving a fuck about copyright in the AI age where companies steal for free. We already pay extra for any kind of storage (CD, Phone, SD, USB, HDD, SSD). The price list is missing in English. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe#Aktuelle_S%C3%A4tze_in_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe#Aktuelle_S%C3%A...
- SpicyUme 2y agoMan I don't remember if it was alpha but I had pretty early access. That story might explain why some songs I remember disappeared, was this in about 2008-09? As I recall I got a ban or a timeout for not using it in Europe but I originally registered with a UK postal code.
- ingohelpinger 2y agoall the big ones did it, Airbnb used to be spammers. lol.
- ahartmetz 2y ago"""Growth hacking"""
- ingohelpinger 2y agolol
- Uehreka 2y agoNah, AirBnB started by selling fake cereal.
- tw04 2y agoRIP grooveshark. Best of its kind, better than Spotify IMO. Just never managed to negotiate the licensing.
- bsimpson 2y agoI think I met the founders at TechCrunch Disrupt in about 2008 and their reaction to "what about licensing?" (the most obvious question for a streaming service) was essentially "lol." I'm not surprised they disappeared.
- pockmarked19 2y agoNot just disappeared. In fact someone literally died…
- pastureofplenty 2y agoI was actually just thinking about Grooveshark earlier today; April will mark 10 years since it was shut down.
- mock-possum 2y agoLala is the one I miss - apple bought it and summarily executed it.
- theblazehen 2y agoI miss it. It introduced me to some of my favourite artists
- bobloblaw22 2y agoBut it's fine because now they have a lot of money and _checks notes_ contribute to the economy or something.
- Neonlicht 2y agoThis sums up the history of Western countries.
- RockRobotRock 2y agoThe secret ingredient is crime
- b3lvedere 2y agoOne cup of developing fast Two cups of breaking things Three cups of ignoring licensing Four cups of breaking laws Five cups of huge risk Six cups of money Seven cups of lawyers Eight cups of success
- helloplanets 2y agoHad to make this into a country ditty on Suno. https://suno.com/song/556b62fc-bcd8-4757-951a-018c5cf0a60b https://suno.com/song/556b62fc-bcd8-4757-951a-018c5cf0a60b
- b3lvedere 2y agoNever had a comment translated into song. That was awesome! Thank you! :)
- BlueUmarell 2y agoThat was.. surprisingly good TBH.
- genewitch 2y agoYeah it's why I'll never write a track to be published, ever again. I never made any money as a musician, and now anyone can put together stuff that people want to hear. I imagine it's similar to amateur artists with SD, and social media managers with LLMs. This is the song I did about the South Korean president coup/whatever (lyrics mostly in Lojban) https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-anymore-byeeee https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music... I wrote lots of music, tho. Hold music for my pbx. https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music
- vincnetas 2y ago
- vanviegen 2y agoCould it be that Spotify had the licenses (mostly) in place at the time, but that the labels didn't happen to have a nicely wrapped zip file of all of their catalogues ready to hand over? In that case, using pirated music seems perfectly legitimate..
- rootnod3 2y agoNot if they were getting it from PirateBay and partook in also seeding the files others.
- cess11 2y agoThey had direct or indirect scene connections and got reliably high quality material. Lots of it. Like Oink amounts. That's what I liked about the early service, they had so much obscure and niche stuff that it was fun and interesting to just browse and discover. Then the entertainment mafia bought in and they deleted huge portions of the catalogue, and I never returned. Bandcamp was good until recently, now it's turning into a garbage dump for "AI" gunk.
- rootnod3 2y agoAt least Bandcamp has days where 100% of the money goes to the artist if I buy something of them.
- exe34 2y agoIt's fine if they do it like Facebook - just leech.
- forgotpwd16 2y agoAlso have Facebook's money and army of lawyers.
- genewitch 2y agoYou still get C&D for your IP bring in the swarm. Uh, this is useful information to know.
- bni 2y agoBig corps steal what I have wrote on the net over the last 25 years. They even use it in ways I don't agree with and sell products from it.
- consumer451 2y agoThis is how the system works. This is a major lesson for all founders. Don't worry about "regulatory." If your product matters, then you will be able to afford to solve the problem. If your product doesn't matter, then "regulatory" will not be an issue. Just ignore it. I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive, but it is exactly how the world works. It's a really important lesson that I really wish I had learned earlier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677087 (see top reply)
- tacker2000 2y agoIn another sense, its the same with Uber and Airbnb, etc…
- consumer451 2y agoExactly. YouTube was one of the OG examples. Same with LLMs and copyright, I suppose.
- bofadeez 2y agoTell that to Kim Dotcom
- consumer451 2y agoHmm, this is an interesting counterexample. What was the difference? Did not have the correct investors? Did not have a unique enough product? I would assume the latter. However, this is an interesting topic for discussion.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoHe knew that and talked about and used alledgedly illegal files. He should just not do the drugs himself and fire everyone who eats from the forbidden fruit and he would be fine.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
- charles_f 2y agoThey were all doing that. I remember deezer asking you to upload music if it were missing.
- spaceguillotine 2y agoyeah I know, i had to C&D them to take my music down forever ago
- oefrha 2y agoAround 2012 I got some credits for Amazon Music (or whatever it was called at the time) so I bought and downloaded a couple of international albums. Then I noticed tracks in a single album could have three different bitrates. Not definitive proof that the files were ill-gotten but very fishy.
- bschne 2y agoFrom Wikipedia: > All tracks were originally sold in 256 kilobits-per-second variable bitrate MP3 format without per-customer watermarking or DRM Don‘t remember 100% but wouldn‘t the variable bit rate explain this?
- oefrha 2y agoDoubt it. It was something like 128k, 192k, 320k. Who the hell encodes the same album like that.
- patwolf 2y agoI purchased an mp3 from Amazon Music, and there was a song that had a glitch in it, like you used to get ripping CDs if there was a problem reading part of the disc. I torrented the same track and the same glitch was there. So either Amazon was using pirated copies or the glitch existed in the actual recording. I guess I'd need to find a physical copy of the recording to compare.
- linwangg 2y ago[dead]
- jeffwass 2y agoJoke by Emo Philips which is deep on many levels : “I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked God for forgiveness.”
- designerarvid 2y agoWhen our American exchange student showed her iPod with 300 songs that she had _BOUGHT_ my friend almost fainted. We couldn't believe it. We all had 10 000+ songs pirated. In ~2009 everyone in Sweden pirated music. Using The Pirate Bay was considered mainstream and the cool kids in my high school were using more sophisticated sites. We thought Spotify was interesting because of the streaming. It was also free back then as there were no ads yet. No one even knew what IP rights were.
- wil421 2y agoI was burning CDs for cash in my American High School before iPods. Once mp3 players with enough storage came out we started using those then iPods. This was early 2000s and almost all kids using computers were downloading mp3s from Napster and Limewire. Once torrents came out I think the bar was higher for downloading tunes but music streaming services started to come out. Even before that lots of folks could copy their CDs and upload them to iTunes. I think it wasn’t normal to buy 300 songs.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIn terms of the computer literacy hierarchy you had people who were ripping FLAC files of whole artist discographies, then you had people going on piratebay for mp3, then you had people using “freeyoutubedownloader” type websites to get crummy mp3 files from youtube, then way at the very bottom of the totem pole, you had people asking mom for the credit card to buy songs at 99cents a pop.
- xerox13ster 2y agoI didn't trust Pirate Bay for mp3s or albums because of the rumors of people getting csam, and even if I trusted it, I was downloading at school so I couldn't get away with installing a torrent software (although it was 2010-2011, and I was using opera 11 with built in torrenting software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). The school would let us install other browsers and music players since they used an app blacklist not a whitelist. My friends and di would also use the PortableApps toolset to install unapproved apps like Quake 3 and networked chat software to our flashdrives and run them from there. I used a Zune and synced all my music at school as a guest device, and there was no way for me to rip dicsographies to flac and had no hardware to play them. The main way I got all my files back then, that you haven't listed here, was by googling the name of the album or song I wanted followed by either .zip or .mp3 and then the words mediafire, megaupload, or beemp3. "[album name].zip mediafire" this was when googles search bar features still worked and exposed most of the raw index (100s of result pages. Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle) Only if I couldn't find it that way would I then resort to using "N°1 Free online Video Converter" onlinevideoconverter.com to rip a song from YouTube. That was usually reserved for meme songs like covers, the Ultimate showdown, Epic Rap Battles, and stuff like the Bedroom Intruder autotune and other Gregory Brothers viral hits. My golden child older brother who was a way bigger intellectual (not technological) nerd than me was the one who begged for the credit card to buy songs once napster shut down. He wouldn't always buy from iTunes, sometimes he would "save money" by buying them for pennies on the dollar (like 20 rubles) from a Russian piracy site that purported to pay the artists, as though that gave him the moral high ground over my piracy, when it was obvious there was no way that was happening.
- xlii 2y agoHeh. I have some story around it. +20 years ago I had a pop-star manager as my client. Super successful, resourceful with a business card holder filled to the brim; yet always on the lookout for opportunities. One day we were chilling and I drawn a concept of a novel music platform. It wouldn’t distribute music (people could download it whatever) but instead granted unlimited license for a fee, and then based on telemetry tracking divide fee between artists and take some percentage as a profit. We discussed it in detail and shrugged off as impossible to execute. Few years later Spotify came out and yet it took it 5 years to enter national market (due to licensing issues that came up during conversation). I often looked at that conversation and brought up two lessons I learned. First: anyone can come up with a magnificent idea, but it’s about execution and not daydreaming. Second: even if you have everything you needed (there we had skills and resources) success is heavily context based. Spotify could launch because they had friendly environment. My was hostile to license innovation, so we could do jack-
- pastage 2y agoSpotify did not have a friendly environment, it was more passion that made it possible. I hope they can stand up against the giants like youtube, apple etc. I have no love for Spotify but they were pretty revolutionary when they released mainly because they managed to go legit so early.
- xlii 2y agoI'm not saying they had it butter smooth (great projects rarely start in completely free-for-all environments). Main stopper was distribution of licenses. There were 100s of LLCs splitted into multi-level trees by ~30 big music groups keeping all the licenses and supervised by artists association. Every LLC kept 2-5 music distribution licenses without any discrimination, local musicians, foreign musicians. Licenses were in constant flux (it wasn't uncommon to 2 companies exchange licenses on weekly basis). A simple reason was income distribution for tax reasons and law sanctioned such procedures. Changes came no earlier than in 2012 when many digital services were already available. And I know that simple answer would be "just ignore the law", but that was also a time when BSA with Microsoft were doing raids with hardware seizure (many of which overturned in courts years after initial seizure). There's no equality of opportunities. That's it and nothing more.
- harry8 2y agoWhy did Spotify prosper and grooveshark fail?
- Gud 2y agoOne cool feature that early Spotify had is that you could put your own MP3s in your playlists and Spotify would synchronise them across your devices. How modern technology should work, but doesn’t anymore.
- lblume 2y agoI agree that would be what good software would do, but what incentives would Spotify have to do that? They would have to pay for hosting and are possibly legally responsible for the file content, which could itself be illegal. And most people today who use Spotify don't extensively listen to music via MP3 files.
- Gud 2y agoThey wouldn’t have to host the files.
- jisnsm 2y agoGoogle Play Music also used to do this.
- mrweasel 2y agoDidn't Apple also do this, or did that require that you had the CD?
- athrun 2y agoApple still does (CD is not required), it's called iTunes Match. It used to be standalone, but nowadays it's part of Apple Music.
- snackernews 2y agoThis comment made me realise I’m still paying for iTunes Match and probably haven’t needed to for several years.
- sorenjan 2y ago
- INTPenis 2y agoI never used Spotify but I was an early Google Play user, now Youtube Music. And I'm a big fan of underground 90s, 2000s gangster rap. Living over here in Europe we had to pirate most of it because the stores just didn't carry stuff like Dubee or Killa Tay. So when I started streaming my old favorite rap tunes I noticed something very interesting. The Google Play copy of a Killa Tay album called Snake Eyes had the same abrupt encoding error as a copy I had downloaded from XDCC many years earlier. It was basically evidence that Google Play were using the same pirated version I had acquired.
- ianbooker 2y agoThe early version of Google Play Music asked for your MP3s, so you could have them in the cloud for streaming. I guess they did this for a baseline of data and music and now I wonder if this was an elaborate hack to circumvent legal implications. Should have read the terms back then. That would be an interesting story!
- the-rc 2y agoUh, no, uploaded MP3s couldn't even be deduplicated across different users, because of lawyers. I know because I was there. The team had to ensure having maaaany petabytes of storage on launch day. Maybe the label or whoever owns the rights to the track today uploaded whatever they could find online? One way to verify that is checking if the same issue occurs on Spotify or Apple Music.
- martinsnow 2y agoFilsystem level deduplication is always legal
- the-rc 2y agoIs that what the counsel said?
- tomrod 2y agoNice! Love to hear the war stories. Do you have insight into what may have allowed some of the anecdotes others are describing, of bootleg versions being the versions used by Google Music/Youtube Music?
- KaiserPro 2y agoThis confirms my suspicions. I used to use spotify a lot from 2010-2015. Around that time I started to buy CDs of the music that I really liked. This mean that I was finally getting legit high quality copies of stuff I had already. It was then that I noticed that certain, more obscure albums on spotify had the same corruptions and odd encoding artifacts that my non-legit copies had, but the actual CD didn't. (sometimes the rips were shit, some had CD dust skips, other had other corruption type errors) So it makes sense.
- bdhcuidbebe 2y agoI was in the spotify beta, can confirm it was all pirated mp3. The client would even upload all songs I had and they didnt to their cloud. The worst part to me was the beta account was a lifetime premium which they just turned into a free account along the way, after snagging my mp3 collection.
- reverendsteveii 2y ago>The client would even upload all songs I had You may wish to edit your attempt to SWIM this
- infecto 2y agoI thought this was already a well known thing? Spotify historically set aside the money from those song plays for any legal costs incurred by playing without a contract.
- eagerpace 2y agoThe best players in every game, including business, are the ones who bend and push beyond the rules. Sometimes the rules evolve, sometimes you get too close to the sun.
- lioeters 2y agoThe big winners are often ambitious players with appetite for risk, including legally and ethically questionable business practices. The risk/reward ratio is high so there are players who will do whatever is necessary to get big returns. I guess we don't hear too much about those who failed, unless they fail big like Theranos and FTX.
- yapyap 2y agoMove fast, break things. it’s been tech’s motto all along, it’s not a good motto, but it works cause the system is messed up
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rs186 2y agoNot surprised. Many successful video platforms started with pirated videos. Copyright is not a word in their dictionary. And once they get big enough/have enough investment money, they suddenly become the good guys, activity engaging with copyright holders to sort things out.
- 52-6F-62 2y agoFor fractions of pennies
- mcculley 2y agoThe most alarming thing to me was that early versions of Spotify would scan your local computer to find music to share. I had to ban it from my office network. My employees had no idea that it was doing that and no way to prove that it was only sharing music.
- mossTechnician 2y agoIt's interesting that Spotify pioneered things that we associate today with AI. There's this, and then there's the bands they created to generate music so they could reduce exposure to musicians who would receive royalties https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- tmpz22 2y agoOh wow I always suspected discover style playlists and broken random algorithm were there to down rank higher royalty artists that I wanted to listen to. We need to get back to owning our own data and music.
- drpossum 2y agoFunny, I got downvoted to hell when I said this exact thing some while ago.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lurk2 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHgc8Q6qTjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHgc8Q6qTjc