Had alpha access and can confirm that this was the case. Also stated it a few years ago [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556181
Many of the early core developers were my seniors at university and the story I heard was that the early Spotify music collection was the superset of the staff's personal music collections. It was great, but once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since.
One anecdote that I have not stated before. In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user. Not sure how remarkable this is these days with Wine becoming so much more powerful, but it absolutely was in 2008.
I also remember sitting in the university staff lounge with some of said seniors and trying to mentally reverse engineer their implementation. Got most of it right; it was great fun and I owe said seniors a lot for "uplifting" me intellectually back in those days. Truly great people.
> once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since
I've had a similar experience where Spotify lost the license for some of the music I was listening the most at the time. That definitely broke the spell early on.
I sub to tidal so I can download the music. I have stopped giving a fuck about copyright in the AI age where companies steal for free. We already pay extra for any kind of storage (CD, Phone, SD, USB, HDD, SSD).
The price list is missing in English.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe#Aktuelle_S%C3%A...
I'm old school, I will never store anything in somebody's "cloud", rather buy X TB of disks, setup backup/sync to secondary location and I'm happy with that solution for more than 15 years.
Quite a few zoomers are transitioning into this mindset too.
I'm not the only person I know with a considerable storage array hooked up to a homelab powering services for family & friends.
I suppose the more 'normie' zoomers might not, but almost every IT/CS/Cyber/Engineering student I know has at least one self-hosted service they run.
Some even still collect CDs!
the question is how many do that exclusively. I have a local NAS that has all my files, but I also back it all up to the cloud as well, because if my house gets destroyed in a fire, I want there to be copy that's not there.
I keep three copies with syncthing.
Home, business, workshop.
What service do you use to backup your nas?
arq to backup my laptop to the cloud and my nas, which isn't the same as backing up my nas. for that there's backblaze
I was given an account when it was in beta. the breadth and quality was amazing. I would listen to Merzbow box set, obscure country, every album I could think of. I studied so many eras that I'd missed or never knew about.
When it went public most of my playlists got emptied.
> In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user.
I used a bit later on linux via Wine and it was working just fine. One of the best Wine experiences I had back then.
I still remember my confusion when native linux client came out and crashed, produced choppy output or had issues to start at all... Weird times.
My experience too. Early Spotify had the best music and I could find pretty much everything I liked, plus excellent recommendations. I don't think it was that the music I liked was particularly obscure or anything, it was just that it was all there. I just couldn't believe how great it was! Once out of beta (alpha?), it lost that magic.
Man I don't remember if it was alpha but I had pretty early access. That story might explain why some songs I remember disappeared, was this in about 2008-09? As I recall I got a ban or a timeout for not using it in Europe but I originally registered with a UK postal code.
Looking through emails I think somewhere between 2007-2008. We built a Spotify pirate clone when they went legit, it died because we were not good at being 1337/illegal, the cloud was not trusted, and most importantly Spotify was just easier (and legal).
This reminds me of how someone at Riot helped with patched wine versions to run League of Legends because they themselves used Linux. Not sure how good the support is these days with the new anticheat and all.
Yeah, I had the same experience, found a comment from 2018:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057725
Thinking about it I also remember a client I can't remember the name of that was mainly an indexer/file explorer on top of samba shares that just traversed everyone on the same subnet on SUNET that many used as a pseudo extension of their own library, sort of proto-cloud storage.