Not that we should, but it's technically feasible to have a music streaming server with the torrent as the backend, and selectively download the part of the torrent in respond to on-demand streaming request from the client.
The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus
I recently got into the whole homelab *arr stack for things like movies and tv and while I know options exist for music I just don’t see the need yet price-wise. Spotify is still just cheap enough for me to not care enough. We’ll see how long this holds.
That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.
I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.
I feel like Ek receives a disproportional amount of hate for this. You have all these American CEO's pouring their investments in the American war machine (Palantir, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc) and no one bats an eye.
Is it because this time it's going to a European company?
No, it's because Spotify is a consumer facing brand that people interact with daily and are aware of even if they don't use it. Also they're notorious for not paying artists well.
Practically nobody "likes" war. However, when facing adversaries like Putin who don't care for democracy, human life, human rights, agreements and contracts, who have no conviction beyond "might makes right", not ensuring clearly superior military capabilities ultimately means submitting to their plans of domination. Reflexively rejecting any kind of military investment is naïve and plays into the hands of the likes of Putin. It is no surprise that in the west, political parties and actors with proven ties to the Russian regime predominantly promote this faux-pacifist narrative, effectively inviting the fox into the chicken pen.
I'd rather download music and buy LP's, especially from smaller artists, than having a Spotify subscription. They get a much bigger cut and I get something tangible, if unpractical. The only ironic part is that a lot of small artists only print an extremely limited number of LP's, I don't understand why they don't let people purchase their stuff? Like maybe it's for the "limited feeling", but that just feels dumb as fuck.
I'm paying for youtube music, but on the side I started buying records in bandcamp directly from artists and putting them in my jellyfin library. I do use lidarr for some older tracks. I think the ecosystem is starting to look good enough, where you can have your own personal spotify.
