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by pockmarked19 500 days ago
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days.

I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something available to customers. Is that true?
3 comments
mzl 500 days ago
Before the launch, Spotify had a deal with the music rights holders association in Sweden (STIM) that they could use a merged collection of friends and families music libraries. All this was removed before Spotify went out of beta.

So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.

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arwineap 500 days ago
Users would upload their copies of the music and spotify would replay them. This was obvious to early users, even if they were only consumers, because of the pirate-shout-out-overlays that were in a lot of the poorer quality releases.

Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it. Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's how they were affording the bandwidth as well.

Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had contracts in place

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lysace 500 days ago
Afaik, the trick was to stream (via http, I assume) the first few hundred kilobytes or so from fast/expensive servers and then try to p2p the rest in some clever order. I guess seeking also triggered the fast/expensive path for a while.
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billdybas 500 days ago
"Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the time.

https://lizpelly.info/book

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