If Spotify wanted to be really sneaky, some amount of downtime might be good for them financially.
The bulk of their revenue comes from customers who subscribe on a per-month basis, while they pay out royalties on a per-song-played basis. This outage is reducing the amount they have to pay, and if the outage-elasticity-of-demand is low enough they could (hypothetically) come out ahead!
> while they pay out royalties on a per-song-played basis
I believe this is inaccurate. They pay out royalties on a share-of-all-plays basis, don't they?[0] So an outage wouldn't reduce the payout amount, it would just slightly alter the balance of payments for individual rightsholders.
[0]http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#royalties-i...: "That 70% is split amongst the rights holders in accordance with the popularity of their music on the service. The label or publisher then divides these royalties and accounts to each artist depending on their individual deals... Spotify does not calculate royalties based upon a fixed “per play” rate."
Not across multiple regions though. It's not trivial to make an application cross region but at least there is a way to engineer around an outage, unlike this outage
I think it's a great idea to diversify not just regions, but providers.
The future is for per-application virtual networks that are agnostic to the underlying hosting provider. These networks work as an overlay, which means that your applications can be moved through providers without changing their architecture at all. You could even shut it down in provider A and start it in provider B without any changes at all.
At Wormhole[1] we have identified this problem and solved it.
Even if Amazon.com uses AWS (the extent of which seems it may be a mixture of marketing hype and urban legend), there are many ways AWS could fail that affects customers but leaves Amazon.com unaffected.
"Downtime Period" means, for an Application, a period of five consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than five minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.
I see from the down votes that my reply must have been seen as kind of off topic to the GCE issue, however since Spotify came up as a "victim", I did feel it prudent to mention that Spotify Premium has offline playlists to allow users to weather network issues of any kind. Also for me personally, big playlists of quality music like this one is fantastic for my work.
