Ask HN: What made it so hard to create the Spotify player back in the day?

by weejewel on 1/1/2023, 12:29:47 PM with 2 comments
I’ve been watching ‘The Playlist’ on Netflix about Spotify’s history. What made it so hard to create a fast music player back then? Nowadays any kid can basically do it, so I’m wondering which building blocks now weren’t available back then?

  • by speedgoose on 1/1/2023, 12:45:14 PM

    Spotify was created at the same time than the clouds services like AWS S3. So it was a bit old fashioned servers management and they couldn’t rely on the cloud like we do today.

    The competitor Deezer arrived very soon after Spotify but didn’t use peer to peer but a cluster of dedibox servers instead. It was extremely low costs servers with a super slow VIA x86 CPU, one 1TB consumer hard drive, a power supply shared between two servers, and a fair amount of bandwidth. I believe deezer was much easier to implement by using a simpler architecture closer to the modern cloud model (shitty managed VMs on overprovisioned hosts vs shitty managed bare metal).

    They both used the flash player to play the music. Deezer was more web and Spotify more flash.

    That’s for what I remember.

  • by controversial97 on 1/1/2023, 1:05:19 PM

    I'v never used spotify but I imagine part of the problem was that when they launched in 2006 there were lots of people using windows 98 and windows ME on single-core 233MHz cpus and dialup internet.