Comment by azeirah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azeirah | Hacker News Reader

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You're underestimating Winamp and related own-your-music music players. I have real-world usage data on quite a lot of music players and websites, here's the top 30. The number is how many songs played in total on that website (I run something similar to last.fm scrobbling)

This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.

    1   YouTube                               14,244,087
    2   Spotify desktop                       2,751,012
    3   Monstercat                            1,171,321
    4   Pandora                               895,765
    5   VLC media player                      892,006
    6   iTunes                                854,311
    7   SoundCloud                            724,019
    8   YouTube Music                         640,801
    9   Deezer                                501,474
    10  Winamp                                289,216
    11  Foobar2000                            251,726
    12  Vk.com music                          134,319
    13  Aimp3                                 123,306
    14  Musicbee                              113,652
    15  Google play music                     89,827
    16  Epidemicsound                         87,573
    17  Spotify web player                    81,590
    18  Media monkey                          70,611
    19  Amazon Music                          55,691
    20  Clementine                            29,750
    21  Tunein radio                          24,413
    22  Google play music desktop (community) 22,910
    23  Media Player Classic Home Cinema      15,654
    24  Pot player                            11,348
    25  Plug.dj                               8,144
    26  Tidal web player                      7,770
    27  Jriver media center                   5,200
    28  Digitally Imported di.fm              4,636
    29  SiriusXM                              2,397
    30  Dubtrack.fm                           1,031

Pleasantly surprised to see Clementine in the list (though a bit disappointed with how low it is in the list).

Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D

I tend to add whatever users request. There have been music players in the past that were requested but I was never able to add support for.

The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.

Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.

I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that

There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.

It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)

Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place

For classical music nothing beat YouTube. Other I am not sure but I expect you are right.

Except perhaps in the audio quality department... I don't know how much things have changed, but I recall youtube doing a bit of compression on the imported audio.

If this data was captured by something like scrobbling, then this isn't an accurate representation of the landscape because it's opt-in only.

Opt-in does not mean the data is inaccurate. It could be wildly off, but most likely it is in the ballpark, and there is a chance it's completely indicative of the relative usages by various platforms.

If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.

It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere. I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.

> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally

Yes and this very same data shows that the top 4 most popular options are streaming platforms.

>It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere.

What evidence do you have for this?

> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.

Agreed. The above data has around 90% streaming. Why are you claiming it is wrong when it says what you claim is the truth?

Musicbee is such a great music player/library program. A pity it's not open source and available on Linux.

Absolutely! You can still run older version of Musicbee under WINE and it works without much issues. Now a days I use Guayadeque player and quite happy with it.

This is what’s typical of a saturated market. Top 98% are streaming services with the remaining 2% being battled over by thousands of niche apps

What’s #3 Monstercat? That seems to be a record label, not playback software.

monstercat.com has a music player, that's where the count comes from.

My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.

No MPD? I use it for over a decade. Looks like iam still a nerd.

I think that's mostly due to my target audience. This data comes from twitch streamers who want to have music playing during their streams.

I'm sure some of these people use MPD, but given what I've read after googling it seems like you need to be a technical person to set it up.

If you kind of familiar with linux its really not hard and works kind of of the box.

But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.

Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.

Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.

Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:

    # mpc search artist moloko | grep -i doctor | shuf | mpc add

1: https://icecast.org/

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