Worked fine for who? I enjoy Spotify so much more than the good ol' days of foobar2000 and then like.
- I can play any song or podcast that I want without ordering a CD (that I couldn't afford as a kid) or opening up a torrent client.
- Curation is taken care of. Every song I've ever "liked" or added to a playlist is available on any of my devices, without me having to worry about syncing.
- I can discover music similar to an artist or song with Song Radio. I have curated playlists created for me based on my tastes (Discover Weekly).
- I can cast to any other device, like a Sound bar.
- I can run this application on Mac, Linux and Windows and it works without a hitch on all 3. I remember back when native applications simply didn't appear on Linux. Skype was the dominant video calling service and it simply didn't work on Linux. Now you can choose the OS that you want knowing that all software will work, without mucking around with Wine.
There's two kinds of people - those that pretend that Spotify and others don't have any new features compared to Winamp 5.0. The second kind pretend that these features are useless or no one wants them. Nope, I like the status quo just fine. So do tens of millions of others.
All of that software is still available. Download Winamp (https://www.winamp.com) or whatever other "lightweight" players you want. Fact is, people voted with their wallets and they went with the streaming services that use electron for their clients.
I believe this is the important part "I want without ordering a CD (that I couldn't afford as a kid)"
Spotify makes it cheap to use without ownership - like uber basically - and millions do like that.
I blame the greedy music business that really didn't want to sell singles.
They've been forced to change - partially thanks to amazon and apple - but they embraced the change too late, and instead change was forced upon them.
The music biz could of made a version of limewire where people could pay for songs at a fair price and get top quality.. take advantage of the curation people were doing, and more - but they went to courts to block instead.
There's more than 2 kinds of people.
Some people voted with their wallets for MusicMatch Jukebox 7.1 - then yahoo took it, ruined it, then killed it.
Many people are voting with their wallets to borrow music from a fancy playlist company - that's cool -and I'm glad it exists. I prefer to own music that I can put on different devices myself and access anywhere anytime without an internet connection or worrying that my license key is not valid.
FI android did AirDrop I think the tide would be different. Amazon an excellent buy digital audio options (via computer) - sadly they make it very hard to download and own digital mp3s using the android app -
I get that some of these decisions are based on the whole - push them to the subscription /rent to use model where we win having lots of people who use it little.. but I prefer to download to the computer unzip and plugin a cable to transfer.
So while tech of the yesteryear is fine, some of the 'modern tech' is purposefully handicapping in some ways - and sometimes they are doing so to keep people hooked on drip-to-use-not-own-rent-forever models.
The good is that more people can enjoy more music - so yay spotify. The bad is that I don't think it's as good for the bands, and depending on the magic wifi can leave you high and dry when you need tunes the most - but at least you'll have a few dollars in your pocket :)
That rent and never own economy is good for some things, but it's not for everything for everybody.
