Spotify Bay
Welcome to Spotify Bay.
There’s an application called SpotSave making waves in the Spotify community. SpotSave lets you save music from Spotify straight to your computer, no strings attached, with the same quality you hear straight from Spotify itself.
I haven’t tried it myself, because to be quite frank, Spotify stinks and doesn’t have any music I enjoy after the Great Purge the record industry performed. (Probably because they don’t really want to see Spotify succeed, because then they’d have to move forward to a new business model.)
Now, consider the following statements:
- SpotSave lets you connect to Spotify to download music to your computer.
- µTorrent lets you connect to clients via The Pirate Bay to download music to your computer.
Is there any difference here?
Technically? Not really. Technology doesn’t care about concepts like “copyright” and “fair use.”
Spotify wasn’t designed to let you download music — the intended design is that you stream music to listen to it.
Pissing in the stream
Here’s another thing technology doesn’t care about — the intended design. Here we have another couple of statements to consider:
- Receive a stream of data from the internet and write it to your hard drive.
- Receive a stream of data from the internet and don’t write it to your hard drive.
When you download, you receive a data stream from the internet and write it to your hard drive. When you stream, you receive a data stream from the internet and let an application do something with it, and then throw the data away.
From an outside perspective, it looks identical — a data stream going from the internet to your computer. What happens inside your computer is what makes the difference between streaming and downloading.
Once the data stream reaches your computer, it’s a Wild West. Spotify intends for me to stream the data to the Spotify application and never save it, but who are they to tell me what to do with a data stream my computer receives from the internet? Sure, there’s probably some unreadable legalese in the Spotify EULA about this, but that’s not exactly enforcable without a Spotify representative watching over my shoulder, is it?
I haven’t tried SpotSave, but here’s a qualified guess at what happens: it looks at connections to/from your computer, identifies the ones going to Spotify, and then makes a copy of the streamed music and writes it to disk.
This is very basic stuff, and has been done before. It was a popular method to save web radio transmissions for later use, and probably the main reason the record industry got their panties in a bunch about web radio technology in the first place.
Floodgates
Since history tends to repeat itself, this will start an arms race between Spotify and SpotSave. Spotify will start by encrypting their data stream (and I’m surprised they didn’t do it in the first place). If the SpotSave authors pick up the thrown gauntlet, they’ll dig deeper into Spotify’s allocated memory and rip the decrypted stream out of that instead. Spotify might claim the Blizzard defense and state that they own the copyright of a part of memory in your computer and sue SpotSave for copyright infringement. And so on.
This is why DRM – Digital Restriction Management (though some people insist on the R meaning “Rights”) — keeps failing. In order to prevent the product from being copied, they lock it up with encryption. But the customers can’t play it if it’s encrypted, so the key to unlock the encrypted data is also included in the product the customer buys.
That’s right; the customer gets both the lock and the key. It’s always just a matter of time until someone discovers where the key is hidden, and then the floodgates are wide open again. All it takes is one person to discover it and then tell someone else. Security through obscurity isn’t.
Here’s another cute little application of relevance — Mutify. Mutify is an app that also listens to the incoming data stream to Spotify. If it detects a song with a title that is in its database, it simply mutes Spotify until the next song starts. The list of “songs” are, of course, the ads Spotify plays for non-paying accounts. If there are new ads you can just click “This is an ad” in Mutify and enjoy the silence.
The arms race has already started here, and Mutify currently doesn’t work as intended with Spotify — Spotify simply pauses the ad when Mutify mutes the sound. Until then, you can just lower the volume yourself. Let’s see Spotify try to work around that.
On a similar note, there was a faceless TV exec that expressed great horror at the concept of switching to a different channel during the commercial breaks, stating that you violated a social contract by doing so. What if I need to go pee? What if I mute the sound and read a book until the commercials are over?
Owning your own interpretation
I have random thoughts about this all the time — what kind of control do I actually have over the interpretation of data streams arriving at my computer?
Let’s take web pages. They’re written in HTML, which is basically a language that tells your web browser how to display a page.
You could argue that I’m violating a contract by having a program that auto-mutes Spotify whenever an ad plays. Am I violating a contract if I tell my browser to not show images even if the HTML tells it to?
I use GlimmerBlocker to strip out the image tags for ads and banners from the stream of HTML before it reaches my browser. Am I violating any contract here? I’m clearly not viewing the page as the designer intended.
It’s the Wild West again. Once HTML reaches my computer, it’s up to me to render it as I see fit. Noone would argue with me if I surfed with images disabled in the browser due to being on a very slow connection. Stripping out useless banner ads not only preserves your sanity, it also makes the page load way faster due to all the needless crap you don’t have to download.
I’ve specifically configured my ad blocker to let text ads from Google through. These ads aren’t intrusive and don’t tell you to punch the monkey. This is the type of ads I want to encourage, so I let them display.
Once or twice a year I even click on one.
February 23rd, 2009 at 15:06
It’s all very interesting to follow for sure. I’m pretty certain Spotify will win the struggle. After all they have the µTorrent developer on their payroll…
What you forget in your analysis is that there are no user agreements needed to watch a webpage with banners. Just as you don’t have to sign an agreement to watch a commercial channel on your TV. This makes your reasoning about Mutify rather flawed.
And it’s interesting to see how the perspective has changed about Spotify. First all the pirates said Spotify sucks because of bad audio, small content, centralisation etc. Now, all of a sudden, Spotify is great because one little program… (Even though you may be the exception to the rule.)
February 23rd, 2009 at 15:15
I’m pretty neutral about Spotify. What really interests me is the intersection of technology and legal/social contracts, such as what I can do by choosing to interpret the data I receive in different ways. The phrase “information wants to be free” was coined for a good reason.
February 23rd, 2009 at 15:30
Actually Spotify seems to pause the ad whenever the volume drops “quick enough”. Meaning that a manual mute, or a big volume drop in one go will be detected. So adding a keyboard shortcut that sets the volume to 5% doesn’t work (at least not over here).
However, when lowering the volume gradually Spotify lets it pass. And that wouldn’t be hard for the Mutify developer to implement…
February 23rd, 2009 at 16:19
I gave that a quick try, and pressing the mute button on my keyboard or quickly dragging the volume in the control panel to zero did indeed pause the ad, while gradually lowering it didn’t trigger it.
February 25th, 2009 at 09:46
Actually, when Spotify pauses, it starts again if you press play even if the volume still is low, so the fix would be even easier. Especially since Mutify is implemented in AutoHotKey.
February 23rd, 2009 at 18:45
Do you have a link for more on the Blizzard thing?
February 23rd, 2009 at 18:53
Here’s one that looks decent. You can search for “blizzard glider eula” etc to find more.
Overall it’s a pretty bad precedent — not being able to do what you want with the memory in your computer.
February 27th, 2009 at 16:27
Interesting post!
I agree that some people will do what they want with a stream of data to their computer. But the one really in control is the provider of the stream,(which needs powerful hardware, know-how, and money to be sustainable). The quality of Spotify, and what creates the huge demand for service lies in the stream, that people can explore and get immediate acccess to a huge library of music (and create a new music collection every day in form of a new playlist.) I think Spotify (and it´s stream) serves the public need of constant change and exploration. That is the power of a well executed streaming service in my opinion. Saving it to your computer may have its benefits but for most of the users I think its just a rather timeconsuming hobby.
Despotify actually got access to the spotify stream but only for premium (paying) customers, which is fair since spotify pays for the hardware. No matter how many hacked spotifyversions that arise, they still have to get hold of the spotifystream, and that one will never be free.
In general i think pirate activites will continue to serve pirate needs ie downloading,torrenting,collecting,tagging, sharing, releasing and bragging about music. Streaming serves the more general need of just browsing music according to mood and taste. And thats a key difference. Both will of course, continue to exist but streaming will, thanks to its broader appeal, be a larger , more social experience. And the fact that some people are,( through a specific personal interest), tinkering with the stream when it ends in their computer, is not a real worry for Spotify and other services like it. Thats what I think at least…
March 1st, 2009 at 17:06
SpotSave no longer works.
March 9th, 2009 at 09:08
Why do you think “the Great Purge” happened? Because they knew that something like SpotSave would come along. And sure ads are annoying, but that’s what keeps “free” services like this running. Freeconomics, you know. I bet Spotify won’t last very long, surely the record companies will pull out if downloading their whole catalogue is made this easy. Why can’t people just enjoy Spotify as it is? If you want to download shit, there’s the Pirate bay etc available. Dumb fucks!
April 1st, 2009 at 14:06
Spotify stinks? :O Yeah… That’s your opinion
April 1st, 2009 at 14:09
Yes, this one has grasped the concept of “blog” quite nicely.
April 12th, 2009 at 16:42
Will they ever get some customer service?
Or are they soooooooooooo overwhelmed with pissed off customers it takes more than 3 months to reply?
My god Spotify really sucks !!
April 19th, 2009 at 20:38
Regarding Spotify and streaming, Spotify has a cache on your harddrive so it won’t have to download data that often. This makes one question wether you stream the music or not.
But they indeed lack some good electronic music to be attractive.
May 16th, 2009 at 15:23
Since Spotify was hacked I’ve had to change my e-mail address etc because of identity theft, and yet they still say don’t worry.
Tottally amateurish !!
April 24th, 2010 at 10:56
good post! I have the same opinion and analysis about spotify. Spotify will lose soon… I bet