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Huge fan here, sad to see people so up in arms. Spotify offers two valuable things: of course, every song ever with no need to tag them, manage your library etc

Huge fan here, sad to see people so up in arms. Spotify offers two valuable things: of course, every song ever with no need to tag them, manage your library etc etc But most importantly it’s insanely good for discovering new cool music. It’s the latter - discovery - that I pay for. Song radio, artist radio, “discover weekly” get me through the day. Spotify outages are rare enough no one thought it could go down. They’re doing well. Consider: if you manage your own music library there’ll be days the hard drive doesn’t work, vpn dies etc etc. - to operate at 99.99% reliability you’re only allowed 4 minutes’ downtime per month. If you dick around fixing your NAS for an hour you just blew your whole year’s downtime budget. So for Spotify to go so long without downtime is amazing. Looking forward to the postmortem!

dylan604 2y ago
every music platform that claims to have great discovery eventually decides i've discovered enough and then starts to repeat things just like corp radio. the discovery is a sham. of course it's going to sound great when you first start to listen to something different, but there's only so much out there. eventually, they're going to start streaming preferred things at you
- cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  I understand you as saying "I don't want to use a product because in future it'll turn to shit". Spotify has not turned to shit. It might happen in future but isn't happening right now and they're showing no signs of letting it happen. If and when Spotify does turn to shit I'll move on: I'll download my playlists and fetch every track via yt-dlp, deemix, et al., manage tags and cover art with musicbrainz et al, use AI to create tools that generate playlists that I can sync to my devices. I'll carry it with me on all my devices. I anticipate the library being around 30-60gb, not that much these days. But man is all that a ton of work. My world-view is: I use great stuff while it's great, and hedge against it turning to shit by having an escape plan. But to sit around not using something great because there's a chance it might turn to shit in the future, is missing out on how good the thing is right now.
  - relic 2y ago
    I also have had great success with discovery on Spotify versus anything else I've tried (Pandora, etc.) Obviously I haven't tried everything but I discover tons of new music from Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist. If there is a better discovery service I'd love to know what it is, because that's a huge part of what I use it for.
pirates 2y ago
My self-managed on-device music library has 100% uptime. I don’t know why you think managing your own library has to include everything you mentioned.
- relic 2y ago
  100% seems to be rounding up a bit. Is it all on your device? Because that's a pretty prominent path to failure. Do you host it yourself in a service? Even if your OS layer has resilience, and your disks are resilient to failure, you have redundant power to your hosting infrastructure and your network connection? If it's in the cloud, it's not like AWS or the like don't have their own issues. People saying their own setup of anything has 100% uptime with no paths to failure I think are under-estimating how many ways your self-managed service could become unavailable. This is the first time I can ever remember having spotify have an outage of this magnitude (and I use it all day, every day) and it only lasted 5 hours. Pretty good SLA.
heyparkerj 2y ago
“Every song ever” is a frustratingly inaccurate summary, as someone who’s had their songs pulled off the platform with no notice that I wouldn’t hear them again.
relic 2y ago
You're getting downvoted, but I totally agree with you (except for the "it has every song ever" part, it doesn't). Spotify has an amazing discovery engine (maybe subjective, but me for it is the best one I've tried), and I don't even remember the last time Spotify went down. It went down for a few hours, people asking for their money back (opinions on here are more rational, but on Spotify support forums, it's unhinged...jeez, shit happens). I love spotify and I hope they can quickly figure out their issue and put some blocks in place so it doesn't happen again, and I hope the engineers didn't have too bad of a day (although I'm sure it was terrible), but I appreciate them for their service and its a service I'd gladly pay for. If we're going to hate on subscription services, Spotify is way at the bottom for me.

dylan604 2y ago

every music platform that claims to have great discovery eventually decides i've discovered enough and then starts to repeat things just like corp radio. the discovery is a sham. of course it's going to sound great when you first start to listen to something different, but there's only so much out there. eventually, they're going to start streaming preferred things at you

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
I understand you as saying "I don't want to use a product because in future it'll turn to shit". Spotify has not turned to shit. It might happen in future but isn't happening right now and they're showing no signs of letting it happen. If and when Spotify does turn to shit I'll move on: I'll download my playlists and fetch every track via yt-dlp, deemix, et al., manage tags and cover art with musicbrainz et al, use AI to create tools that generate playlists that I can sync to my devices. I'll carry it with me on all my devices. I anticipate the library being around 30-60gb, not that much these days. But man is all that a ton of work. My world-view is: I use great stuff while it's great, and hedge against it turning to shit by having an escape plan. But to sit around not using something great because there's a chance it might turn to shit in the future, is missing out on how good the thing is right now.
- relic 2y ago
  I also have had great success with discovery on Spotify versus anything else I've tried (Pandora, etc.) Obviously I haven't tried everything but I discover tons of new music from Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist. If there is a better discovery service I'd love to know what it is, because that's a huge part of what I use it for.

pirates 2y ago

My self-managed on-device music library has 100% uptime. I don’t know why you think managing your own library has to include everything you mentioned.

relic 2y ago
100% seems to be rounding up a bit. Is it all on your device? Because that's a pretty prominent path to failure. Do you host it yourself in a service? Even if your OS layer has resilience, and your disks are resilient to failure, you have redundant power to your hosting infrastructure and your network connection? If it's in the cloud, it's not like AWS or the like don't have their own issues. People saying their own setup of anything has 100% uptime with no paths to failure I think are under-estimating how many ways your self-managed service could become unavailable. This is the first time I can ever remember having spotify have an outage of this magnitude (and I use it all day, every day) and it only lasted 5 hours. Pretty good SLA.

heyparkerj 2y ago

“Every song ever” is a frustratingly inaccurate summary, as someone who’s had their songs pulled off the platform with no notice that I wouldn’t hear them again.

relic 2y ago

You're getting downvoted, but I totally agree with you (except for the "it has every song ever" part, it doesn't). Spotify has an amazing discovery engine (maybe subjective, but me for it is the best one I've tried), and I don't even remember the last time Spotify went down. It went down for a few hours, people asking for their money back (opinions on here are more rational, but on Spotify support forums, it's unhinged...jeez, shit happens). I love spotify and I hope they can quickly figure out their issue and put some blocks in place so it doesn't happen again, and I hope the engineers didn't have too bad of a day (although I'm sure it was terrible), but I appreciate them for their service and its a service I'd gladly pay for. If we're going to hate on subscription services, Spotify is way at the bottom for me.