Spotify is brilliantly architected»
A few members of the Spotify team wrote a paper describing their architecture. It’s very readable if you’re remotely aware of how TCP works. I had no idea the service was using a Peer-to-peer network to do its heavy lifting. It makes a ton of sense, and I hope Apple’s impending streaming service is equally well-engineered. I have my doubts given the legacy of Mobile Me, but hey, companies are capable of change.
Either way, I hope Spotify makes its way to the United States very soon. It’d be a shame for such a wonderful service to miss the boat to the Goliath of Cupertino (or Google… or Amazon). The more competition we have in this space, the better consumers fare. I’ve been using Rdio for the past few months, and I’m generally very pleased with its offerings. But I’d love to see how much innovation we could squeeze out with another large contender on our shores.
Addendum: The very fact that the Spotify team was willing to publish this paper demonstrates how confident they are in their offering. Spotify is (albeit at a high level of abstraction) telling competitors exactly how its service works! They’re begging Amazon and Google and Apple and the likes to copy their model. Those are some cojones.
(Source: news.ycombinator.com)
