Spotify – It’s real magic!

Evening guys,

for the last few days I wanted to write this post, but just didn’t get around to publish it.

Before you continue reading, you should of have read my last post about Spotify a few months ago: Spotify – Last.fm on crack!

A few days ago, I was sitting together with a few other CS students, and we got to talk about Music. I immediately showed off my favorite music player, Spotify.

• Ow, you use Spotify. Looks cool to play back your Music… Woow, you have a huge Music Library. How many Gigs is it?
• No idea, it’s not on my Laptop.
• Huh? It must be, it can’t be streamed off the internet. It plays instantly!

After 30 minutes of traffic dumping and analyzing, we all agreed that it’s magic! It’s not possible that you can play a song instantly and skip to any place in it without buffering! It defies the laws of the internet! Ping? Packet Routing? Delays? Spotify has never heard of it! It plays as quickly as my local iTunes!

So one of my friends decided to call up Spotify, who’s HQ are in London, so it was a local call 🙂

We got a very nice receptionist, whom we asked about Internships. She clearly noticed that we loved Spotify and asked what we love so much about it.

• The Speed! It’s awesome!
• Heh, Yeah, we do that.

I mean, come on! A kind laugh! As if it would be normal. Let me tell you now, it’s not! So that evening, I remembered Peter Saint-Andre mentioning that he knew the CTO of Spotify, Andreas Ehn. He immediatly sent out a mail introducing me to Andreas, and I got a reply shortly after that.

In reply to my accusation that Spotify would be magic and package routing, he just had the following song: http://open.spotify.com/track/4ONTc23rNiTCBqP833K6rc

He also said the following:

Seriously, though, we’re not doing anything magic. Short buffers, lots of capacity, light-weight client application, light-weight streaming protocol minimizing the number of round trips (despite using TCP). And of course there is a local cache, but Spotify is pretty quick for stuff you’ve never played before, too. We do have a bunch of rather good developers. 🙂

The thing that I am missing in Spotify is some of the brand new music, and the possibility to see who added what to my collaborative playlist. For the rest the app is perfect! And I don’t say this often 🙂

I hope that I’ll meet Andreas Ehn at FOSDEM this year, as I seem to have missed it the last time.

The thing I don’t get, why ask for £9,99 per month for the Premium Subscription. It’s too much. The price Last.fm asks is decent. For 2,5€ I would immediately get a Premium Account. But as it stands now, I don’t see why I should pay that much for so little more.

At this point I just want to say two more things:

I’m sorry, but I don’t have any Spotify invites left 🙁 So I can’t give out any free accounts anymore.

And second: Spotify definitely redefined music!

And now off to bed 🙂

But before I leave, I specifically asked, and I am allowed to post Screenshots this time.