
Spotify as a simple case study in making something people want - gedrap
http://blog.garrytan.com/spotify-as-a-simple-case-study-in-making-something-people-want
======
guelo
The technology had nothing to do with Spotify winning. There were probably
hundreds of startups that built cool music tech but they all failed because
they couldn't get the licenses. As far as I know the true story about why the
RIAA gave Spotify the green light after saying no to so many before them
hasn't been told.

Edited for duh...

~~~
jamesblonde
The truth is that Daniel Ek met the major 4/5 labels at the same time and
showed them their (at the time pirate) software. They said - yes - if we can
own 75-80% of you. The truth is that the major labels own about 80% of Spotify
between them - it wasn't the RIAA.

~~~
caractacus
No, the record companies own about 20% of Spotify. The rest is VC and founder
owned.

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jamesblonde
See here:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4555798/kreitzspotify_kt...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4555798/kreitzspotify_kth_kista14.pdf)

The 200ms latency 'wasn't possible' because of how TCP congestion control
works. Spotify used to use 2 channels for downloading - the first chunks would
come from their servers, then you would try and download the rest of the song
and do read-ahead on the p2p network. Consequently, the TCP connection to
their servers would be idle for a bit causing the congestion window size to
drop back to 1 segment (1500 bytes) in size. Over higher latency networks
(wireless), TCP slow-start could take up to a couple of seconds to get up to
speed, as you need a RTT to increment the segment size. Spotify's trick was to
build (compile, more likely :)) a version of TCP on their servers that
prevented the congestion window from connected clients from dropping back.

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ollifi
Looks like they haven't yet turned it into profit though
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/business/media/as-
spotify-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/business/media/as-spotify-
expands-revenue-rises-and-losses-deepen.htm)

~~~
marincounty
I thought I lived near the guy who invented Spotify in Marin county? He has
definetly made quite a profit off Spotify?

~~~
stephenhess
There's a difference between generating business value and generating profit.
It's common for founders to get liquidity during financing events and this
typically involves a sale of equity (i.e. transfer of business value from the
founder to another stakeholder).

This is distinct than the company becoming profitable; many companies will
increase in value while not being profitable.

The original commenter is making this comment I presume because he/she thinks
Spotify is a mature enough business where it should be generating profits
instead of operating at a deficit in order to grow and grab market share.

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Mithaldu
Spotify gets props for being the first player on that market who really
managed to grab share, but since Google Play Music exists and allows uploads
of one's own music collection as well as dynamic cache-ahead on wifi of
playlists on mobile devices², it's had some feature catch-up to play and
doesn't seem to even have any willingness to do so.

² this is massively huge for people with bandwidth caps on their mobile
contracts

~~~
threeseed
I believe Apple did this first with iTunes Match.

Either way neither product is doing particularly well with it. So easy to see
why Spotify isn't bothering to add this feature.

~~~
toast0
Well, my.mp3.com did something similar Jan 2000. Online music is really a
licensing problem, not a technical one.

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karangoeluw
> if the music starts in two hundred milliseconds or less—about half the time
> it takes, on average, to blink—people don’t seem to perceive a delay

Anyone know how spotify may have achieved this? My instinct is that they pre-
download the next song in the queue + heavily cache everything. But in my
experience, playing a new song in almost instantaneous too.

~~~
moe
_200ms latency_

 _Anyone know how spotify may have achieved this?_

There is no magic in this. 200ms is an eternity and would actually be
considered rather poor performance.

Realistic latency is closer to 100ms for a cache miss (~40ms for your client
to reach spotify plus another 40-60ms for their internal fetch).

You have to realize that music files are tiny and consume very little
bandwidth by today's standards. All commercial music combined (roughly 30
million songs) fits into half a rack of storage.

~~~
Jarred
It's more challenging considering that most of Spotify's traffic is P2P.

~~~
moe
_most of Spotify 's traffic is P2P._

They shut that down last year; [https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-
shutting-down-its-ma...](https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-
down-its-massive-p2p-network-140416/)

------
snissn
I haven't used spotify for ~3 years and last week wanted to listen to some
specific music, so i downloaded it. Within 20 minutes, a really really
annoying audio ad came on and I went from thinking that this team has built a
really great product since i've used it, to having a really negative opinion
about them because the ad disrupted my flow as I was in the midst of a great
hacking session.

Something that they could do differently that might be interesting, is to
special case ad plays for new and returning users and slowly increase the
quantity of ads that are played. This way my initial experience is very
positive and as I get used to incorporating spotify into my workflow, I get
more used to ads, and can decide whether I want to be a paying customer or use
the product with ads. I wonder if anyone else has incorporated similar growth
hacking strategies.

~~~
kornish
> I went from thinking that this team has built a really great product since
> i've used it, to having a really negative opinion about them because the ad
> disrupted my flow

Just throwing this out there because you mentioned it's been a while since you
used Spotify -

Spotify offers a premium service for $10/mo which allows unlimited music
without ads playing every few songs [1]. If ads are the deciding factor in
whether or not you consider the application "really great" and you decide it's
worth it to you, the option is there for ad-free listening.

[1] [https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/](https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/)

Looks like they have a deal right now - 3 months for a buck.

~~~
rpedroso
The main reason I bought Spotify premium (other than access to the full mobile
platform) was to ditch the ads. I don't mind ads so much, but Spotify ads are
particularly annoying. I seemed to get a lot of ads from fledgling hiphop
artists, including extended samples of their songs, which was really
disruptive and unpleasant when listening to folk/americana. After one two many
focus sessions were ruined by obnoxious ads, I went ahead and bought premium.

Perhaps this was intentional :-)

~~~
hnur
Another folk/americana fan here, and I get contemporary pop music ads between
my tracks on Spotify, and there's nothing more annoying than autotuned
screeching between my Bob Dylan and Gillian Welch.

However instead of buying premium, I just use Spotify for discovery. If I like
something I just get the album off iTunes, Amazon or Bandcamp. I find myself
spending less per year than if I had subscribed to Spotify, _and_ I get to
keep my music.

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sandstrom
I would love it they'd tune down the game mechanics, upgrade prompts and
'viral factors'.

I'm already paying for it, yet there is no way to turn of the notifications
and very hard to opt out of Facebook integration.

It's still an awesome product, but I hope they don't lose the magic.

~~~
cdcarter
You can hide the "Friend Feed" with the View menu, and your settings can
disable social features AND announcement notifications.

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trustfundbaby
> Solution: 200 milliseconds

I remember that this is what blew me away about Spotify ... I'd used streaming
services before, rdio, grooveshark etc .. but on my phone the streaming would
take a while to load, in bad patches of reception it would cut out etc etc.
Spotify was the first mobile streaming experience that made it to where I
didn't need my itunes any more, and I never looked back after that.

Its a shame who ever is running the UX for their products is trying really
hard to roll back all the awesomeness and good will they've worked for, by
making questionable decision after questionable decision, their latest desktop
update being the case in point.

~~~
pm
Curious to know what you find obnoxious about their desktop UI (Mac or
Windows?).

~~~
trustfundbaby
let me count the ways.

\- They removed Album view a few years ago now (version 0.8.4) ... I still
have that version installed at home because I like/need it so much.

\- They removed starring/favoriting of songs, in favor of some other (add
song/add album) thing that just doesn't work the same way despite them asking
you to try it that way.

\- In the latest version of their app they moved things around that had be in
locked positions for YEARS ... for no reason.

\- Then they removed the ability to search inside of playlists ... again for
no reason you can see the fury of the masses in all its beauty here ...
[https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-
and/...](https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/The-
latest-desktop-version-is-a-downgrade/m-p/1045906#M113377) ... completely
ignored by spotify of course.

\- Their mobile app is still mostly great but has a couple of no brainer
things that they've never got right (playlists sort in reverse order from what
you'd expect, now you can't delete a song from a play list without editing the
entire play list etc etc etc

Spotify just stopped caring about what the people wanted a long time ago ...
they've gotten slow and bloated and I bet they have an army of Product
managers poring over all sorts of data and making these weird decisions,
instead of engaging their common sense ... either way ... if something comes
along that has a bit more soul, and love for its customers ... I'm off in a
heart beat, and yes, I've paid the full price for spotify for almost 4-5 years
now.

~~~
pm
I'm not sure if the different desktop versions have feature parity - from what
I've seen of Spotify's development process, each platform is handled by a
different team.

Excuse my ignorance, but what is the album view, and how is it different to
what's currently in the app (as there seems to be something that I'd consider
to be an album view for OS X)?

As for the rest of your points, you are on the money; seems to be a lack of
commonsense.

~~~
trustfundbaby
This is album view
[https://cloudup.com/cJvEFN0tMAv](https://cloudup.com/cJvEFN0tMAv)

The difference was that you could turn it on in any playlist not just look at
it in the "Albums" sidebar item

------
bjblazkowicz
The streaming part of Spotify is what makes the service great. But when it
comes to improving their desktop-app they really are doing some weird stuff
with their hipster developers. I think they are suffering from something that
I'd like to call "the winamp effect".

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jnks
This may underrate the real difficulty of Spotify: convincing record labels to
let them give away music for free on the assumption freemium would have a
reasonable conversion rate to paid.

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task_queue
I've never understood the appeal of Spotify, recommendations are shit, the
client/ads suck and I'm not whipping out my credit card when I've got a music
collection + Google Play + iTunes.

~~~
camillomiller
Looks like we are a minority. Spotify is a lesson about building what people
want. Sometimes people just want crap, because free. Sustainability of the
model for the musicians and the shitty payments they get is not even taken
into account, obviously.

~~~
josteink
Eh. Spotify is a great service and that is why I pay for it.

It lets me sample new music instantly and organically without needing to
pirate anything, and if I really like something, I can buy it and add it to my
Plex too. Yes I know that I can probably find the album on certain torrent
sites, download it in less than 1 minute, unpack it and then get the song I
wanted to listen up and playing.

But that's a hell of a lot of work, compared to just double-clicking the song
and having it playing instantly. And if the song sucks, you dont need to keep
seeding albums you actually want to delete just to maintain ratios at private
trackers, etc etc.

Using Spotify is just so much less hassle. These days I find I use Plex less
and less for music, and Spotify pretty much gets used 99.9% of the time.

So I'm curious: What do you think is crap with Spotify?

~~~
camillomiller
The Music experience. It's superficial, and it's imprinting in younger
generations that music is just another commodity. I'm not making a Luddite
statement, just saying that listening to music by proxy without the physical
or digital experience of owning the music itself is part of a general
depreciation of music making.

