[ad_1]
Spotify is doing a podcast on its own history, and the first two episodes are well worth a listen for the details on the move from piracy to streaming, how the company decided to grow their business, and the technical details of how they are doing it. did. There are also some fun interviews included, with the podcast featuring stories from Napster inventor Sean Parker and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich.
In the podcast, the founders of Spotify discuss the history of piracy in Spotify’s home country of Sweden to provide context for its development environment. This goes into the existence of the Swedish Pirate Party, a genuine political party that once held several seats in the country’s parliament. The founders are also discussing how they wanted to take the ease of pirating music while still making it legit.
If talking about being easier than hacking sounds familiar, it’s probably because it was also part of the iTunes Music Store talk. It seems, for the most part, that iTunes and the iPod are pretty much ignored altogether. The podcast features music distribution ranging from CD stores to Napster to Spotify. Apple and Spotify aren’t best friends, but honestly it’s somewhat hilarious to hear how the story completely ignores the fact that people could, in fact, buy digital music (an option that existed even before the launch of Spotify).
Despite the lack of objectivity on the history of digital music, the technical depth alone is worth listening to. The second episode (titled 01) explains how Spotify used the same peer-to-peer technology that hackers used to create their legitimate music streaming service and how their approach blew people away at the time. Even if the story leaves out some pretty important parts, it’s still worth listening to the origins of the popular music (and, obviously, podcasting) service.
[ad_2]
Source link