Why is spotify so popular?
There are different solutions to listen to music.
What does spotify do that almost no one else does?
Is it the music library or something else?
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
Because as much as the app sucks the everything else is better than everyone else's music app, at least here in India where we have Apple Music as well. Recommendation, organisation, playlist - it feels like Apple Music is doing all that for a different species altogether. Now I already have said how bloated Spotify iOS app is and I still take it any day over Apple Music's native app. Hell, there are flows in Apple Music that has never gonna past a click at certain page whenever I've tried (that's quite a few in times in last few years). Esp. flows around which they try to play with iCloud and social aspects. Hell, I can't even decide what not to see on my Apple Music home screen. Sometimes I've to do few sipes to reach what I am looking for. Even with all the bloat Spotify never tires me like that.
$25/month for 5 users "all you can eat" music library every month is incredibly hard to beat, even if self hosting terabytes of your own music library.
I have been on Spotify from almost the beginning, and see zero reasons to switch. The app never bothered me at all - I find the reactions in this thread startling.
I have no issues with Spotify either, but my usage pattern is pretty simple.
I search for the album I want to listen to and then listen to it. Sometimes I search for an artist and then locate the album in their discography and listen to it.
The ‘Jam’ function is fun when you have a group of people listening to music together.
I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.
I have absolutely noticed all the complaints and stupid problems with the App on desktop. It constantly breaks in stupid ways. Every few releases, the "Discover Weekly" generated playlist loses the ability to hide/disable songs which is supposed to provide signal to the system to recommend fewer songs you dislike. So of course it barely works even when the UI element is there. 1/4 of the time the discover playlist is exclusively songs Spotify should be able to figure out I do not like at all. But song recommendation hasn't really advanced past what EchoNest demonstrated over a decade ago, and unlike most situations I comment on, I actually did a project to try and make a ML model for music like that and understand why it's difficult.
One time an employee even stated in the support forum that the ability to disable songs on the Discover Weekly playlist was purposely removed! Yet it was back within a year.
Spotify as a service is also pretty shitty. Their catalog has constant churn from whenever they change licensing deals, but they make no effort to point old playlist references to the exact same song under a different database id. It's infuriating, because it means that playlists rot, and often within a year! Every time I look at my saved songs, more are just missing. They colluded with rightsholders to rip off artists even more, and they have been purposely colluding with a company (run by a friend) making "AI Music" to swamp the service with so they can manipulate the royalty pool to pay out even less money to real artists.
I don't switch because the whole "Play songs" feature works just fine, I like the discovery features when they are semi-functional (I even use the AI DJ garbage sometimes, and it works well!), and the alternatives are Youtube (Which I hate but will probably switch to if Google ever succeeds at banning ad blockers from Youtube), and Apple, who's entire theory of business is hostile to me and I don't own any iDevices.
I use Youtube also, I subscribe to Premium so that includes music and is ad-free. Never not found a song or artist I was looking for.
I listen to music mainly in the car or maybe as background when I'm cooking or doing other chores. I am not someone who has earbuds in all day or who does focused listening or spends time making playlists or seeking out new artists in my favorite genres. So the playlist management, discovery, etc. features and whether they work well are not really relevant to me. I care that its main functions are easy to use and work, and YouTube music does that.
Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with "created for you" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..)
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
I miss my old Google Music premium account. Those song radio stations had amazing variety. It's incredibly obvious that Spotify plays what you like unless you go out of your way to listen to something new or a new releases playlist but I wish there was a knob I could twist to adjust the temperature of my playlists.
they try to sneak in stuff like payola because they dont have to pay high premiums like taylor swift so its in their interest to move ppl away from top artists into arcane.
Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
Other people no doubt have legitimate complaints, but using Spotify is barely registering as a problem compared to other applications I have to deal with.
That's roughly the positioning, yes. Approachable syntax, low ceremony, runs scripts directly. The difference is that the safety guarantees (no null, tracked effects, exhaustive matching) come for free rather than being opt-in via type checkers.
It is like make but designed specifically for the way non-C(++) users - people like me for example adding scripts like "make run" and "make build" to my node/python/PHP/etc repos - use it. It is great! I still don't use it literally just because make is already installed on any *nix system I encounter day to day.
Interesting, I have never compared make with task but I suppose there’s some overlap. My favorite feature is that it’s cross-platform. I do use it for performing complex builds (like chaining several environment setup and docker compose commands, etc.). Of course you could do this with shell scripts, but this adds a layer of abstraction.
> There is a perception that Swift is only a good language for Apple platforms. While this was once true, this is no longer the case and Swift is becoming increasingly a good cross-platform language.
How good is the developer experience on a non-Apple platform really? Linux is my primary platform and my perception is, that allmost all of the swift eco system is for Apple. Libraries, tools, documentation, IDEs, tutorials, etc. all assume, that you use an Apple.
Can someone tell me who does not use an Apple-device and uses swift?
My experience is that it is very frustrating. Apple's documentation makes no mention of what works on Linux and its limitations, so you just have to guess or work it out with trial and error.
I suspect that Mozilla being the primary developer and sponsor for many years actually meant that compatibility with all major platforms was prioritised; Mozilla obviously care about stuff working on Windows, and run lots of builds on Windows + I imagine a number of Firefox developers (if not drive) at least own a Windows machine for testing Windows-specific stuff!
I call out Windows because I think generally software people go for Mac > Linux > Windows (although Mac > Linux may be slowly changing due to liquid glass).
Is liquid glass really that bad? I left Mac years ago due to other annoyances. It was my daily driver for a decade and change. But I couldn't get used to the iOSification and the dependence on apple cloud services for most new features. When I started with macOS jaguar it was just a really good commercial UNIX. It got even better with Tiger and leopard.
But the later years I spent every release looking at new fancy features I couldn't use because I don't use apple exclusively (and I don't use iOS at all, too closed for me). So almost no features that appealed to me while usually breaking some parts of the workflow I did use.
While I did hate the 'flat' redesign after Mavericks that on its own was not really a deal-breaker though. Just an annoyance.
I'm kinda surprised liquid glass is so bad people actually leave for it. Or is it more like the last drop?
No, but every release of MacOS has a noisy minority declaring it, or some features of it, as the end of Macs. Some people will genuinely hate it in the way that nothing can be universally loved, some people will abandon Macs over it, most people don't feel strongly about it at all.
Maybe there's some people out there that love it, even.
I can barely tell the difference between the Mac I use that's been upgraded, and the Mac that hasn't due to its age, because I'm not spending my time at the computers staring at the decor. The contents of the application windows is the same.
I don’t like it, but I think the claims of mass exodus are unlikely.
It feels a lot like the situation when Reddit started charging for their API: Everywhere you looked you could find claims that it was the end of Reddit, but in the end it was just a vocal minority. Reddit’s traffic patterns didn’t decline at all.
Liquid Glass really is that bad. Not because the visual design is especially bad (not my cup of tea but it's okay); but because all of macOS is now incredibly janky. Even Spotlight is a janky mess now with lots of broken animations.
It's unfinished. For example, the more rounded windows would require that scrollbars or other widgets are more inset and things like that. The system doesn't seem to handle this automatically, so many apps look broken, even Apple's first party ones.
This. We ported a huge component, an ASP.NET server hosted Windows to Linux (/w Docker). We did the initial migration in a couple of days, and only after a couple of months, we basically managed to bring all production installs to Linux.
It only took a year, and everyone works exclusively with devcontainers, and we allow devs to experimentally pick Linux and Mac laptops.
I tried doing compiling a few of my Mac CLI tools to Linux. These days, it's faster to run them through an LLM and get quite excellent Go at the other end, and _that_ is much easier to cross-compile.
I have been looking at the new Android support (don't have the link handy) and it's tempting, but I know Kotlin and always developed for Android with a bare Makefile and the JDK, so I don't need any fancy tooling...
Yes, in my experience the Apple bias exists in all the articles and how-tos you read in a way that can trip you up.
It’s been years now but I wanted to create a Set with weak memory in its keys. Everything I read said “oh just use NSHashTable” and I dutifully did (it’s in Foundation) and then when I tried to cross compile it didn’t exist outside of Apple platforms. It’s not as if the import made it clear I wouldn’t be able to use it, but I couldn’t.
Swift has swiftly to manage the Swift compilers to use (equivalent of rustup) and LSP works pretty well. Most of the (open-source) libs that Apple does are cross-platform. I personally take care to make sure my personal libs work on all platforms as well, including Windows(!) (anecdotal, I know…).
All in all it’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting better, with intent to continue in that direction.
This!
Also, for new APIs Apple reduces (or does not provide) Objective-C documentation.
I really tried to love Swift, but in the end I ended up with 1 project using Swift/SwiftUI, and all the other apps I started to write, I rewrote in Zig or Rust, because the Swift compiler kept giving me vague error messages with no hint which Swift file was the culprit or/and which line/column the error was.
It's quite relevant, considering the OP was a single word with an example. It's kind of ridiculous to claim what is or isn't relevant when the discussion prompt literally could not be broader (a single word).
Hard to talk about what models are doing without comparing them to what other models are doing. There are only a handful of groups in the frontier model space, much less who also open source their models, so eventually some conversations are going to head in this direction.
I also think it is interesting that the models in China are censored but openly admit it, while the US has companies like xAI who try to hide their censorship and biases as being the real truth.
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).