Spotify is making a podcast about its own history, and the first two episodes are worth listening to the details of the leap from piracy to streaming, how the company decided to build its business and the technical details of how it did. There were also some nice 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, Sweden, to provide context about its development environment. It is about the existence of the Pirate Party of Sweden, a real political party that once held several seats in the country’s parliament. The founders also discuss how they want to make the convenience of pirating music, but want to make it legal.
If talking about being easier than piracy sounds familiar, it’s probably also because it’s part of the iTunes Music Store. It seems that iTunes and the iPod are for the most part completely ignored. The podcast offers music distribution from CD stores to Napster to Spotify. Apple and Spotify are not best friends, but it’s honestly somewhat hilarious to hear the story completely ignore the fact that people could actually buy digital music (an option that existed even before Spotify was launched).
Despite the lack of objectivity about the history of digital music, it is only the technical depth that is worth listening to. The second episode (marked 01) discusses how Spotify uses the same peer-to-peer technology that the pirates used to build its legal music streaming service and how its approach blew people’s minds at the time. Although a few important parts of the story are left out, it’s still worth listening to the origins of the popular music (and of course podcasting) service.