It is really hard to compare Napster and Spotify as they are entirely different beasts. Let me just say that I built the Napster server, so I'm biased. I have also been a Spotify user for several years.
For me, Spotify is a sub par experience because I don't know what I want and I have different music tastes than my friends. The only thing that makes Spotify useful for me is sites like http://sharemyplaylists.com/. I imagine for people who know exactly what they want and just treat it like a giant jukebox, it is a fantastic service. I am not one of those people.
Napster for me, was about finding people as much as music. I was part of a community of people that were super stoked to talk about some new indie band. I would search, notice who had music I was looking for, send them a message and start talking.
I met a lot of people in real life through Napster often at shows. I know others did as well since we received thank you letters and in a couple cases, wedding announcements.
I think the community with its passion for music was what made Napster great, not the massive catalog. All I had to do was enter one of many indie channels and read for half a minute before I had three new things to listen to and a bunch of people to talk to them about.
Not to discount the catalog, I will say that the catalog at Napster will possibly never be duplicated. There were a lot of back catalog works, a lot of pre-release works and a ton of bootlegs. Sure, the quality was sometimes poor, but then I used Napster as a tasting service and then, you know, bought the originals when I could.
My hope is Spotify continues to improve and eventually becomes more community oriented or something else comes along and re-ignites the flame. Music is one of those things that is central to a lot of people's lives and you couldn't ask for a more passionate userbase.
Have you not used any of the Spotify Apps (e.g. MoodAgent, Last.fm, and, of course, sharemyplaylist)? If not, then I highly recommend you do - be interesting to see if the experience changes your opinion.
Seems to me that the Spotify API opens up all sorts of possibilities for music discovery.
I disagree with this -- i was a very heavy Napster user in 99 and am a very heavy Spotify user (and, NB, they are a customer) today. Obviously it's a fun angle for a SXSW talk, but:
- The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total indexed, in reality almost 50% of downloads would not be available.) Yes, you could find niche stuff on Napster-- as a musician in 1999 I would make sure all my stuff was available, pre-release, demos, etc. But we have Soundcloud for that now, so...
- The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today. But the only entry into anything was a search box that only looked at ID3v1 data and filenames. There's been amazing leaps and bounds in discovery since then, and it's very clear by the #s that it's what people wanted -- a guided (radio, playlist) experience over a wild west single song retrieval thing.
- Napster was stupid bad at search. There obviously was no catalog resolution and the quality of the results was abysmal. I am pretty sure it was a substring match, for one, and then there was the bad metadata, fake songs, later on a huge spam / "SEO" problem.
- Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible. Ratio FTP sites, hotline, and of course bubblecruft startups building customer bases by selling new CDs for $4. It was very clear at the time even that the distributed nature of Napster was a liability, not a promise, as all the single-server solutions were far more convenient and reliable. But this was not their fault and of course their success inspired everything after it.
- most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available
The backend servers were linked. If your request couldn't be fulfilled on one, your search was forwarded to the next server. The total number of files on Napster at its peek was over half a billion files. Further, that picture must have been from a server that just started because the average server had significantly more users/files on it.
Further, Napster users were ripping everything in sight. There were mp3 encodings of old wax cylinders uploaded for goodness sakes.
- The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today.
There was an entire curated music website dedicated to music discovery that loaded into the client.
The chat and instant message system allowed people to talk about music which created a massive music-focused community. It was wildly popular.
And don't underestimate browsing. People would search for the one song they were interested in, notice who they were downloading from, browse the other user and then start pulling down their music if they noticed several songs they liked in it. They then could send a message to that user and add them to a friend's list. That was not just music discovery, but friend discovery as well.
- I am pretty sure it was a substring match
The very first versions were substring match when there were maybe 10,000 users. Later version were not and allowed basic boolean queries like term exclusion.
- Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible
There was an algorithm on Napster that did network distance biasing. Basically, if you were an AOL user, you'd first get AOL users back when doing a search. If you were an Internet 2 or even @Home user however, your speeds were epic.
On a university network Napster was quite fast. I could routinely saturate my (for that time speedy) 10mbit connection, especially to other clients on Internet2.
One other point to your argument is social. The ability to see what friends are listening to and create sharable playlists is obviously something that Napster did not provide.
You may be a heavy user where "heavy" equals "frequent," but I don't think you're a heavy user where "heavy" equals "eclectic"[1]. Otherwise you'd have experienced firsthand just how useless Spotify is for music outside the mainstream, even (in contrast to what Aloisius said) when you already know exactly what you're looking for. In just the last few days there've been at least half a dozen[2] times when I wanted to listen to something and Spotify didn't have it. Napster never had this problem.
[1] Although I hate that word.
[2] Daughter - His Young Heart, Japandroids B-sides from the Post-Nothing sessions (Younger Us, Art Czars, and Heavenward Grand Prix), anything from Mirel Wagner or 9mm Parabellum Bullet, anything from The Lonely Forest's first three releases, Gotye - Like Drawing Blood (which is so much better than the album that finally made him famous), etc. Spotify is seriously lacking in terms of selection.
- The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total indexed, in reality almost 50% of downloads would not be available.) Yes, you could find niche stuff on Napster-- as a musician in 1999 I would make sure all my stuff was available, pre-release, demos, etc. But we have Soundcloud for that now, so...
The numbers depend on when one took the screenshot. Here's part of one I took on 02/02/2001 23:32PM CST with more than a million files available:
You are correct, I believe Spotify is much better than Napster was in 1999. But there are still huge flaws with Spotify. It's collection is often missing songs due to licensing issues. I'm tired of seeing songs greyed-out because they are "unavailable" where I live. Spotify's search leaves much to be desired (Napster's wasn't amazing either, however).
But I think the essence of what Sean Parker was saying was that there are still many hurdles that a legal system like Spotify will have to overcome. If you really want everything without restrictions, pirating is still a better option.
Napster was cool because it had live music and bootlegs that are often times very tough to find. A lot of napster was sifting through crap songs to find the good versions.
Spotify and the others are cool because you can stream stuff while on your phone. And getting to the music you want to hear was more seamless and straightfoward.
So in summary, almost, but not quite.
Napster was also one of the first geek-tools to really hit mainstream, and boy was that weird.
You really nailed it with this comment. Napster is from another era when the thrill of discovery was much greater than it is now. Objectively maybe Napster isn't as great as all the nostalgia would have us believe. Maybe there are actually more songs on Spotify (probably not, but humor me). The thing is, back then, if you searched and didn't find today, it didn't mean you wouldn't find tomorrow. You never knew when you would find a gold mine of a collection that not only had what you were looking for but actually schooled you on a bunch of new stuff.
Napster was a magical moment where the underground went mainstream for a split second before being snuffed out. Of course these type of (smaller) communities still exist online, and music fans are better off than they ever were, but Napster embodied a sea change that could only happen once.
But the "evil" aspect of Napster wasn't that it was P2P: it was that it didn't return any money to the creators.
No, it's because it forfeited the control the labels had over the music. They've showed again and again that they don't mind losing money to maintain that control.
It's interesting that it's more than a decade since Napster, and the music industry hasn't gone bust yet. It's almost like P2P cannot destroy the main music industry.
I think in retrospect, it destroyed the music industry model, the music industry just doesn't know it yet.
I'm saving this whole thread re-reading it over and over again, thanks to Aloisius chiming in (giving a valuable and rare peek at the back-end), and the insight into what drives music discovery.
I do credit Napster for awakening a love for music. My father had a deep record collection from the 60's, and he had mentioned some very hard to find items he's wanted for decades that I found on Napster in couple of hours of searching. This was what made it awesome for me. The ability to browse someone else's collection was an incredibly effective music discovery system, and introduced me to music I'd never have discovered on my own.
no but the music industry can destroy the music industry, and they're doing a bang-up job of it. maybe a different way to think of it is: it's been more than a decade since napster and the music industry is just now beginning to get a clue.
For me the coolest thing about Napster was all the remixes people were making. You could search for "[anything] remix" (e.g. Tetris remix, Nintendo remix, Sesame Street remix, ...) and find something awesome that would never see the light of day in a label. Some of those remixes bled through into the later P2P systems.
Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital information utopia made possible by the Internet. The paternalistic distribution systems we have now are a mere shadow of what could be without the strangling influence of the media industry.
Hey, if you like discovery try Audiogalaxy Mixes - we just launched it a week or so ago [1]. We think it's better than Pandora (much larger catalog, smarter algos, more input types) - tell me if it's not. It's free on the web (no ads) with a free trial on mobile, after which we charge a small fee to cover licensing costs. If you email [email protected] with your account I'll comp you a free month. I'd love to know what you think.
So just because Napster had built in chat and a wider illegal catalogue it becomes better than Spotify eh? Also, why would I want to know the personality of some ramdom guy on the other side of my p2p connection?
This is mostly a fluff piece with absolutely nothing new or interesting being said.
I thought browsing other folks libraries was pretty cool. As an artist, I'd look myself up, and see what else those people listened to. Pretty neat and I've yet to come across anything similar. I haven't had to the time to investigate the other p2p music platforms since then, so probably others have that feature...
From a user POV, a wider catalog is obviously better. That doesn't mean that Spotify (the company) should start distributing unlicensed files, nor does the article say that.
Yes. Integrated chat, significantly wider catalogue, abilty to browse other people file and to own the file makes napsyer way better than spotify. And I really dislike napster, it introduced beyond par quality, incomplete and mislabled files and fakes. oth.net and audiogalaxy were far superior.
Though, I'm not blaming spotify here, they have little choice but to operate inside a set of imposed constraints. The big labels and the industry are to blame, it's the same old story they manage to derive tons of money from being in control of the distribution, they're not gonna give it up without a fight. Even though it is a fight they cannot win, they will mindlessly fight it till the end, and those who pay for this are the artists and the users.
> What a pity the large labels a decade ago didn't appreciate that Napster was a social network – just one built around music. Who knows, today it might be as big as you-know-who.
I like Spotify and find it infinitely more useful for music discovery than Napster ever was. Sure it would be nice if they had a more comprehensive catalog but finding complete high quality recordings on Napster was always impossible. I dug around for weeks trying to complete an album at a decent bitrate. By comparison Spotify has figured out how to serve complete high quality music legally at a very reasonable price.
I find more awesome music, quicker, with Spotify than I ever did with any other music tool. I especially like the apps for this: Pitchfork, Guardian, RollingStone, etc. This combined with checking out what my "friends" are listening to really is a great way to find good stuff.
The author didn't even clearly state how Napster '99 smokes Spotify. The only feature that I thought he stated was that Napster had a form of chat and how it could have potentially evolved into a social network.
I think it's a little unfair to make a comparison to something that is essentially illegal against something that is not. I know Spotify has it's flaws both in its business model and catalog but as someone who has used virtually every illegal filesharing method going in the past and has now been converted to Spotify I think they should be given a little more credit.
It's not the fault of Spotify that the collection is limited. At least they are trying to move the music industry into the future - whether it will work or not who knows but I'm sure we will all look back in hindsight and see Spotify as the pioneer of whatever comes.
I think you're reading too much into it. The article just gives you a fact - Napster was in many ways better than Spotify is now. It doesn't blame the Spotify devs for it.
My college used DC++ to internally share music, movies, tv shows, and porn. You could browse someones entire media collection. It gave you an overall sense for their taste in music and was a great way to find new bands. Reading about Napster reminded me how much I miss this feature.
The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more important than social features. I do not miss Napster.
Of course, high speed internet is much more prevalent now in 2012 than it was in '99. Downloading an album in '99 sometimes meant you were downloading from PC's with only a 56k modem for connectivity.
And now, my university uses Mojo to browse and download an entire users collection. It works incredibly well, and you really do get to know people. I remember meeting someone a year after downloading almost a 1/3rd of their library, and being able to talk right away.
I hadn't bothered to look at Spotify, in terms of using the service (I was familiar with the company et al). I've used iTunes with locally stored music for a really long time.
So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan.
I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account.
Cloud music services are too limited, and all they get you is not having to store your music on a device you carry around with you all the time anyway.
[+] [-] Aloisius|14 years ago|reply
For me, Spotify is a sub par experience because I don't know what I want and I have different music tastes than my friends. The only thing that makes Spotify useful for me is sites like http://sharemyplaylists.com/. I imagine for people who know exactly what they want and just treat it like a giant jukebox, it is a fantastic service. I am not one of those people.
Napster for me, was about finding people as much as music. I was part of a community of people that were super stoked to talk about some new indie band. I would search, notice who had music I was looking for, send them a message and start talking.
I met a lot of people in real life through Napster often at shows. I know others did as well since we received thank you letters and in a couple cases, wedding announcements.
I think the community with its passion for music was what made Napster great, not the massive catalog. All I had to do was enter one of many indie channels and read for half a minute before I had three new things to listen to and a bunch of people to talk to them about.
Not to discount the catalog, I will say that the catalog at Napster will possibly never be duplicated. There were a lot of back catalog works, a lot of pre-release works and a ton of bootlegs. Sure, the quality was sometimes poor, but then I used Napster as a tasting service and then, you know, bought the originals when I could.
My hope is Spotify continues to improve and eventually becomes more community oriented or something else comes along and re-ignites the flame. Music is one of those things that is central to a lot of people's lives and you couldn't ask for a more passionate userbase.
[+] [-] Mizza|14 years ago|reply
Can you talk about that a bit? What was the underlying algorithm, what was the stack and how much data were you pushing at your max?
[+] [-] swang|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urbanjunkie|14 years ago|reply
Seems to me that the Spotify API opens up all sorts of possibilities for music discovery.
[+] [-] brianwhitman|14 years ago|reply
- The "depth of catalog" is actually incorrect -- Spotify has far far more songs than Napster did (you can see in that screenshot even, most logins/servers hit less than 1m songs totally available, and of course those are just total indexed, in reality almost 50% of downloads would not be available.) Yes, you could find niche stuff on Napster-- as a musician in 1999 I would make sure all my stuff was available, pre-release, demos, etc. But we have Soundcloud for that now, so...
- The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today. But the only entry into anything was a search box that only looked at ID3v1 data and filenames. There's been amazing leaps and bounds in discovery since then, and it's very clear by the #s that it's what people wanted -- a guided (radio, playlist) experience over a wild west single song retrieval thing.
- Napster was stupid bad at search. There obviously was no catalog resolution and the quality of the results was abysmal. I am pretty sure it was a substring match, for one, and then there was the bad metadata, fake songs, later on a huge spam / "SEO" problem.
- Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible. Ratio FTP sites, hotline, and of course bubblecruft startups building customer bases by selling new CDs for $4. It was very clear at the time even that the distributed nature of Napster was a liability, not a promise, as all the single-server solutions were far more convenient and reliable. But this was not their fault and of course their success inspired everything after it.
[+] [-] Aloisius|14 years ago|reply
The backend servers were linked. If your request couldn't be fulfilled on one, your search was forwarded to the next server. The total number of files on Napster at its peek was over half a billion files. Further, that picture must have been from a server that just started because the average server had significantly more users/files on it.
Further, Napster users were ripping everything in sight. There were mp3 encodings of old wax cylinders uploaded for goodness sakes.
- The discovery on Napster was non-existent. You could browse through a users' collection, the same way you can browse through playlists today.
There was an entire curated music website dedicated to music discovery that loaded into the client.
The chat and instant message system allowed people to talk about music which created a massive music-focused community. It was wildly popular.
And don't underestimate browsing. People would search for the one song they were interested in, notice who they were downloading from, browse the other user and then start pulling down their music if they noticed several songs they liked in it. They then could send a message to that user and add them to a friend's list. That was not just music discovery, but friend discovery as well.
- I am pretty sure it was a substring match
The very first versions were substring match when there were maybe 10,000 users. Later version were not and allowed basic boolean queries like term exclusion.
- Not going to get into speed, because it wasn't Napster's fault, but even back then it was far easier to get music elsewhere other than Napster if possible
There was an algorithm on Napster that did network distance biasing. Basically, if you were an AOL user, you'd first get AOL users back when doing a search. If you were an Internet 2 or even @Home user however, your speeds were epic.
* Note: I built and ran the Napster server.
[+] [-] maukdaddy|14 years ago|reply
On a university network Napster was quite fast. I could routinely saturate my (for that time speedy) 10mbit connection, especially to other clients on Internet2.
One other point to your argument is social. The ability to see what friends are listening to and create sharable playlists is obviously something that Napster did not provide.
[+] [-] FreakLegion|14 years ago|reply
[1] Although I hate that word.
[2] Daughter - His Young Heart, Japandroids B-sides from the Post-Nothing sessions (Younger Us, Art Czars, and Heavenward Grand Prix), anything from Mirel Wagner or 9mm Parabellum Bullet, anything from The Lonely Forest's first three releases, Gotye - Like Drawing Blood (which is so much better than the album that finally made him famous), etc. Spotify is seriously lacking in terms of selection.
[+] [-] icehawk|14 years ago|reply
The numbers depend on when one took the screenshot. Here's part of one I took on 02/02/2001 23:32PM CST with more than a million files available:
https://1e400.net/i/BP6LdMPm/napster.png
[+] [-] joejohnson|14 years ago|reply
But I think the essence of what Sean Parker was saying was that there are still many hurdles that a legal system like Spotify will have to overcome. If you really want everything without restrictions, pirating is still a better option.
[+] [-] xpose2000|14 years ago|reply
Spotify and the others are cool because you can stream stuff while on your phone. And getting to the music you want to hear was more seamless and straightfoward.
So in summary, almost, but not quite.
Napster was also one of the first geek-tools to really hit mainstream, and boy was that weird.
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
Napster was a magical moment where the underground went mainstream for a split second before being snuffed out. Of course these type of (smaller) communities still exist online, and music fans are better off than they ever were, but Napster embodied a sea change that could only happen once.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
No, it's because it forfeited the control the labels had over the music. They've showed again and again that they don't mind losing money to maintain that control.
[+] [-] psychotik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreanix|14 years ago|reply
I'm saving this whole thread re-reading it over and over again, thanks to Aloisius chiming in (giving a valuable and rare peek at the back-end), and the insight into what drives music discovery.
I do credit Napster for awakening a love for music. My father had a deep record collection from the 60's, and he had mentioned some very hard to find items he's wanted for decades that I found on Napster in couple of hours of searching. This was what made it awesome for me. The ability to browse someone else's collection was an incredibly effective music discovery system, and introduced me to music I'd never have discovered on my own.
[+] [-] meatsock|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|14 years ago|reply
Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital information utopia made possible by the Internet. The paternalistic distribution systems we have now are a mere shadow of what could be without the strangling influence of the media industry.
[+] [-] ljf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhangen|14 years ago|reply
I wish Pandora could buy one of these services and combine their discovery engine with the catalogues of the subscription services.
Until then, I think I'll just keep buying music.
[+] [-] psychotik|14 years ago|reply
Here's a Mix I've made, for example: http://www.audiogalaxy.com/mix/87-Guitar%20Gods/?
[1]http://www.geekwire.com/2012/audiogalaxy-music-service-rebor...
[+] [-] Reebz|14 years ago|reply
I love Pandora for the guidance.
WAH is available on Spotify, which is good (I used them before Spotify), but it's very niche indie discovery.
I can't select a Temptations song and expect to be then offered up a Clarence Carter or Tower of Power hit.
Only Pandora has those "skillz".
[+] [-] mds101|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchrisa|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Malcx|14 years ago|reply
Yes that's ignoring the legality of it, but ultimately we repeatedly see that users will ignore legal issues in favour of convenience.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikodoko|14 years ago|reply
Though, I'm not blaming spotify here, they have little choice but to operate inside a set of imposed constraints. The big labels and the industry are to blame, it's the same old story they manage to derive tons of money from being in control of the distribution, they're not gonna give it up without a fight. Even though it is a fight they cannot win, they will mindlessly fight it till the end, and those who pay for this are the artists and the users.
[+] [-] Hyena|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|14 years ago|reply
Ping?
[+] [-] ecocentrik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invisible|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thematt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeptical|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gaoshan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantbecool|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwblackwell|14 years ago|reply
It's not the fault of Spotify that the collection is limited. At least they are trying to move the music industry into the future - whether it will work or not who knows but I'm sure we will all look back in hindsight and see Spotify as the pioneer of whatever comes.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitterfounder0|14 years ago|reply
The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more important than social features. I do not miss Napster.
[+] [-] e03179|14 years ago|reply
Of course, high speed internet is much more prevalent now in 2012 than it was in '99. Downloading an album in '99 sometimes meant you were downloading from PC's with only a 56k modem for connectivity.
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdcarter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shingen|14 years ago|reply
So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan.
I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account.
Nope.
[+] [-] skeptical|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] funkah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeycfan|14 years ago|reply
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