Spotify is making a podcast about its own history and it’s worth listening to the first two episodes for details on the leap from piracy to streaming, how the company decided to build its business and the technical details of how it did it. There are also some fun interviews included, with the podcast featuring stories by Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, and Lars Ulrich of Metallica.
In the podcast, Spotify’s founders discuss the history of piracy in Spotify’s home country, Sweden, to contextualize its development environment. It goes to the existence of the Pirate Party of Sweden, a true political party that has already occupied several seats in the country’s parliament. The founders also discuss how they wanted to take the music piracy facility, but make it legitimate.
If talking about being easier than piracy sounds familiar, it’s probably because that was also part of the iTunes Music Store proposal. It seems, for the most part, that iTunes and the iPod are completely ignored. The podcast features music distribution ranging from CD stores to Napster and Spotify. Apple and Spotify are not the best of friends, but honestly it’s quite hilarious to hear how the story completely ignores the fact that people could, in fact, buy digital music (an option that existed even before Spotify was released).
Despite the lack of objectivity about the history of digital music, the technical depth alone is worth listening to. The second episode (labeled 01) shows how Spotify used the same point-to-point technology used by pirates to build its legitimate music streaming service and how its approach surprised people at the time. Although the story leaves some very important parts out, it is still worth listening to to hear the origins of the popular music service (and, of course, podcasting).