this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
557 points (90.2% liked)
Technology
59582 readers
4407 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Have you ever looked into the operating costs of having a server with music on it which over 400M monthly active users use?
I actually work in cloud engineering and regularly price this kind of thing up.
Their costs are salaries not aws bills.
But that's practically true of any large tech company. It's been conventional wisdom in the tech industry for over a decade that tech is cheap, people aren't.
Yes. Spotify needs to figure out their burn rate for their salaries because taking more money away from artists isn't the solution like op wants.
But taking money away from employees is?
No one is saying pay employees less. Spotify needs to figure out how to make its business work. That's for sporify to figure out. If you think Spotify deserve more of the pie when they contribute... a download server, vs. the artists who do all the actual work, then you can honestly just fuck off. We live on totally different sides of the conversation, you want to shill for big tech, I want the artists that make the music to get paid.
Not that high. Spotify uses some pretty tight compression (not good, just tight); most users get 96-128kbit/s AAC, premium can go a bit higher if opted in. That works out to about 16KB/s or 58MB/hour, assuming nothing's cached.
Bandwidth pricing very much goes down with scale, not up. But even the non-committed AWS pricing at Spotify's scale is 2 to 3 cents/GB. You end up paying way less than that with any kind of commitment and AWS isn't the cheapest around to begin with.