It gets increasingly difficult to design a website properly when you have different teams with different goals each competing to put their little feature front-and-centre, leading to a hacky job on top of a hacky job on top of a hacky job, which in turn hurts the performance until one day someone finally decides to re-think the whole thing from scratch and pisses off >50% of its users in the process that are used to the mess.
It's way easier to nail the UX when you're still in the dozens-of-employees stage of growth and offer like five features in total.
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments:
Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy.
Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits).
Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.
Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
The only reason you're saying that is because you haven't tried to build such a detector yourself. It's not like text where it's impossible to tell reliably if something's AI generated or not, from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt.
Nobody open sourced their detection algorithm as that would just trigger a cat-and-mouse game between Suno/Udio and a detection platform (and Suno/Udio have way more VC money than you do), but plenty are being sold as a service and work very reliably.
> …from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt.
It's trivial to vibe-code something that detects watermarked output and accidental model fingerprints. But next week the watermarks will be defeated, and the accidental fingerprints will change and ultimately disappear. It's not possible to generally solve the "To what degree is this audio AI generated?" problem, any more than it has been to solve the same problem for text and images. https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
You're discussing pure hypotheticals, I'm discussing what you can do today with very little effort. If that changes, it changes, but so far it's trivially easy.
The question I'm more interested in is why other music streaming services are not interested in doing this trivially easy work to get rid of spam, even if it's just for the short run as you assume it will be.
...and add a bunch of other restrictions like limiting API access to premium users, ludicrously increasing the cap for acceptance into the extended quota programme (250k MAU), and so on and so on.
So the most fucked in this situation are neither Spotify nor Anna's Archive, but anyone trying to build anything on top of what was up until this point the most straightforward to use API in the music industry, which annoys me to no end.
Cool, feel free to create a website that does as much as lists track names and let me know how long will you survive before your hosting provider gets flooded with bullshit DMCA notices and shuts you down.
I'm not talking about downloading music, I'm not even talking about some custom player for reproducing music, I'm talking about just putting say a list of songs from a playlist as plain text online.
Because I don't disagree with that premise at all but am forced to play by these bullshit rules? I wish I didn't have to, but if I want my website to exist and continue to have any sort of audience, I have to play by those bullshit rules. The alternative to no API access isn't "more decentralisation", the alternative is absolutely no human curation what so ever, as that process tends to require some sort of API-powered tools to wade through the (nowadays >30% AI-generated) noise.
Here's like the dumbest use case: say you have a hundred artists you wanted to follow and be notified whenever they release any new music, without any of it slipping through the cracks because of "the algorithm" and without any sort of preference towards the most mainstream subset of those 100 artists. Once you already have an established brand and have crossed some sort of an arbitrary, almost always non-transparent threshold of clout, there are dozens of ways for you to do that. Hell, Apple will reach out to pay you to plug into their API and use their embed above everyone else's. But while you're a nobody, even this trivial use case from a technical perspective is made virtually impossible because you can't get access to any sort of API to simply plug into.
Anyways, not much of a problem to me any more as I can easily prove my side project reaches a six figure amount of people every month with no advertising, but I promise you it would be a problem to you if you ever decided to try build anything even remotely music-related.
It's centralized because there's a few big labels that own a lot...but otherwise it's such a commodity that you can go to any streaming service and you more or less have the same catalog.
Anna's Archive went public with their announcement late December, Spotify started communicating this API lockdown mid-January. I have no evidence to back that up, but judging purely by the timing, it sure seems like these two events are connected and something Spotify did reluctantly to appease the big labels.
Yes stealing other peoples things to 'give them away' is very noble. The meta data is useless to me. I can no longer build an app on top of Spotify's API because they've had to lock it down.
There is nothing open about that. You own none of it. Only usable within their walled off platforms.
Want to build an alternative player? Can’t do that. Support new or alternative hardware? Sorry, no API access. Want to record them onto a tape/CD/SD card? Forbidden. Want to play songs at your neighborhood party? Illegal. Use them for a funny video? Nope. Even sharing lyrics gets you a DMCA takedown request.
I really hate people using terms like "theft" or "piracy" to refer to the act of artificially-limited copying. Copying something does not take anything away from the person you're copying from inherently. Theft does. And piracy is like theft, but with murder and kidnapping too.
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