• Aatube@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Have you ever looked into the operating costs of having a server with music on it which over 400M monthly active users use?

    • echo64@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I actually work in cloud engineering and regularly price this kind of thing up.

      Their costs are salaries not aws bills.

      • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • echo64@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • chameleon@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.