Atomic Playboy

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.

Spotify is a good idea. Too bad that the implementation is pretty horrible.

For starters, Spotify makes it very hard to find new music to listen to. I can search just fine, and Spotify even has a modest amount of the music I listen to. But why can’t I find any new music?

If I look at the “radio” tab, I see eighteen categories, none of which describe the music I like, and a slider to pick a range of decades of music. The big problem here is that the categories are horribly generic.

I listen to a lot of electronic subgenres, yet the only thing vaguely resembling my taste is “techno” — and I don’t listen to techno. After 30 minutes of listening to music in this strange techno category, I heard one single song I could maybe classify as techno. The rest was trance, goa trance (which, of course, isn’t the same as trance), drum and bass, synthpop and futurepop. I can’t think of any way to make Boards of Canada qualify as techno.

They need to take a long hard look at last.fm. There I can participate in social tagging and tag artists and groups with whatever genres I think they fit into. Looking at the EBM tag at last.fm I see a fairly accurate representation of actual EBM – though I don’t really know what Covenant is doing that high up on the list.

Another thing they need to borrow from last.fm: Where are all the other users? Why can’t I add friends? See what they listen to? Find other users with similar taste in music that way?

Spotify is a nice idea. But it feels too much like Web 1.1 with one-way communication from the music industry to a silent crowd of passive consumers, rather than the social activity you can get at last.fm with user taxonomy, forums, discussion and music comparisons letting you find new music.

If I want to find new music on Spotify the only way is to play the incredibly vague “techno” category and hope I stumble upon something I actually like.

This is me on last.fm. At a quick glance you can see what I’ve listened to recently, what my favorite music is, and if you’re a registered user, get a comparison to see how our music tastes match.

Get to work, Spotify! We’re not in the 1990s any longer.

Last-minute edit: One minute after posting this Spotify gave me opera song and instrumental chamber music… which is apparently techno.

Update: It does seem that they actually listen, and last.fm scrobbling support was recently added. It’s a small step forward, at least.