Not surprised. Spotify crapping out constantly and songs disappearing drove me away from streaming. So in 2023 I stopped paying for streaming services entirely and have gone back to actually buying CDs and ripping them or hitting bandcamp for FLACs etc.
Life is much better. No one can take my shit away, I don't depend on some transient service existing or license or any external competence and I can choose how much I want to pay and when. It just works.
I think I was born an old curmudgeon because I've essentially always felt this way. That said, Spotify got me to subscribe at least for a bit because I could not match its catalog and convenience. I also try and keep a FLAC archive of all music I might want, but some things just don't exist on other mediums these days.
Unfortunately I was seduced by the iPod years ago. I ripped then sold mine and the ex-wife's CD collection totalling some 1800 albums years ago. Then went streaming and as about 99% of that was covered, deleted it all because I couldn't be bothered to manage it all.
I wish was that old curmudgeon you mention back then!
Yes I also host a Navidrome instance at home and connect using subtracks on Android or Feishin on macOS/Windows, and have a Wireguard VPN for connecting when out-and-about.
Is there a way to sync a library of FLACs for example across devices? Like a music player that syncs with a private S3 bucket?
Not sure if S3 is a hard requirement for you. But many in the self-hosted community use Plexamp/Jellyfin.
I personally really like: https://github.com/sentriz/gonic
Put it behind tailscale or similar vpn and listen to your music anywhere!
I just plug my iphone into my mac and drag the files into VLC.
Last thing I want to do is make things even more complicated or have to maintain and pay for my own homebrew spotify.
Even the status page is down
hosting the status page on the same domain as the service is a choice
It's on a different subdomain for support and hosted by something else. So while some domain ownership issues or poorly prepared dns changes could impact both, it's not the same as their actual service.
The status page being down should be a good indicator of the status
It's called a liveness probe :) maybe they use it for load balancer health checks...
And here I am playing King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's latest single on repeat in VLC like a chump.
I hope they post a post-mortem afterwords. Given that the outage seems to be on an infra-level (support domain is far from the app stuff) I take it something really funky has happened.
looks like someone might have nuked their entire Kubernetes cluster again
over/under on it being DNS??
It's not DNS.
It can't be DNS.
It was DNS.
Huge fan here, sad to see people so up in arms. Spotify offers two valuable things: of course, every song ever with no need to tag them, manage your library etc etc
But most importantly it’s insanely good for discovering new cool music.
It’s the latter - discovery - that I pay for. Song radio, artist radio, “discover weekly” get me through the day.
Spotify outages are rare enough no one thought it could go down. They’re doing well. Consider: if you manage your own music library there’ll be days the hard drive doesn’t work, vpn dies etc etc. - to operate at 99.99% reliability you’re only allowed 4 minutes’ downtime per month. If you dick around fixing your NAS for an hour you just blew your whole year’s downtime budget.
So for Spotify to go so long without downtime is amazing.
Looking forward to the postmortem!
“Every song ever” is a frustratingly inaccurate summary, as someone who’s had their songs pulled off the platform with no notice that I wouldn’t hear them again.
My self-managed on-device music library has 100% uptime. I don’t know why you think managing your own library has to include everything you mentioned.
100% seems to be rounding up a bit. Is it all on your device? Because that's a pretty prominent path to failure. Do you host it yourself in a service? Even if your OS layer has resilience, and your disks are resilient to failure, you have redundant power to your hosting infrastructure and your network connection? If it's in the cloud, it's not like AWS or the like don't have their own issues. People saying their own setup of anything has 100% uptime with no paths to failure I think are under-estimating how many ways your self-managed service could become unavailable. This is the first time I can ever remember having spotify have an outage of this magnitude (and I use it all day, every day) and it only lasted 5 hours. Pretty good SLA.
every music platform that claims to have great discovery eventually decides i've discovered enough and then starts to repeat things just like corp radio. the discovery is a sham. of course it's going to sound great when you first start to listen to something different, but there's only so much out there. eventually, they're going to start streaming preferred things at you
I understand you as saying "I don't want to use a product because in future it'll turn to shit".
Spotify has not turned to shit. It might happen in future but isn't happening right now and they're showing no signs of letting it happen.
If and when Spotify does turn to shit I'll move on: I'll download my playlists and fetch every track via yt-dlp, deemix, et al., manage tags and cover art with musicbrainz et al, use AI to create tools that generate playlists that I can sync to my devices. I'll carry it with me on all my devices. I anticipate the library being around 30-60gb, not that much these days. But man is all that a ton of work.
My world-view is: I use great stuff while it's great, and hedge against it turning to shit by having an escape plan. But to sit around not using something great because there's a chance it might turn to shit in the future, is missing out on how good the thing is right now.
I also have had great success with discovery on Spotify versus anything else I've tried (Pandora, etc.) Obviously I haven't tried everything but I discover tons of new music from Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist. If there is a better discovery service I'd love to know what it is, because that's a huge part of what I use it for.
You're getting downvoted, but I totally agree with you (except for the "it has every song ever" part, it doesn't). Spotify has an amazing discovery engine (maybe subjective, but me for it is the best one I've tried), and I don't even remember the last time Spotify went down. It went down for a few hours, people asking for their money back (opinions on here are more rational, but on Spotify support forums, it's unhinged...jeez, shit happens).
I love spotify and I hope they can quickly figure out their issue and put some blocks in place so it doesn't happen again, and I hope the engineers didn't have too bad of a day (although I'm sure it was terrible), but I appreciate them for their service and its a service I'd gladly pay for.
If we're going to hate on subscription services, Spotify is way at the bottom for me.
The outage forced me to use the free Amazon Music service that comes with my Amazon Prime subscription. It has many of the annoyances that come with its video services, including ever-present up-sells and muddiness around what's available or pay-walled. Apparently rewinding a song is a premium feature, too.
Suffice it to say that I'll wait out this and any outage before switching if this is how they treat "less than" subscribers.
Happen to be flying right now and luckily downloaded content continues to play. (Obviously.) I am looking forward to reading a post-mortem.
time to see what downloaded content I have...
My trusty local files from bandcamp, 7digital, and amazon have yet to fail me.
Streaming itself seems to work though, I could just press play on my Sonos system and it just continued with the playback.
Maybe it's still working due to caching?
I was playing Spotify music till about 20 minutes ago, but I noticed that the last song that was scrobbled to Last.fm was at 14:17 (1.5 hours ago)
This outage gets me thinking of alternatives. It's nice to have just a folder of music that is completely offline.
can confirm. its even nicer with something like syncthing to sync the folder between multiple devices. you get the benefit of being able to add new tracks on one device and having them sync to the other, but still having both devices work offline when needed
App and streaming mostly work for me (slower then ususal and search seems broken). Interesting outage.
at least offline playback works, though the ui is still sluggish when it thinks it should be able to reach their servers (airplane mode is snappy, bad internet connections or service outage it waits for long timeouts).