The tunes, they are a-changin’

“Spotify promises to get people excited about

music again, and the result will be a new golden

age of music — more people discovering and

listening to more music than ever before.”

Those are the influential words of Sean Parker,

co-founder of the infamous yet pioneering

music-sharing service Napster, which let

people swap the music on their computers with

anyone who wanted it. Unlimited songs, for

free, at people’s fingertips and on a scale never

seen before. Sounds familiar, right?

But with the original Napster, artists weren’t

compensated for their work. And all the while,

record labels had no idea how to embrace the

service. They sued it from all angles, forcing it

to shut down and reopen in a stripped-down

form. Sean was unable to realize his vision

for the company as a revolutionary way to

swap music with friends (Napster has since

relaunched completely and is owned by U.S.

retail giant Best Buy).

Now, a decade later, Sean can rest easy at

night: Spotify is here. As an investor and advisor

to the Swedish startup, Sean has spent much of

his time trying to build up buzz around Spotify.

When it finally launched in the States in July

2011, he took to his Facebook Wall and started

raving about how it was going to change every-

thing.

Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, has revealed that

he was a big user of Napster back in the day,

and there’s no doubting its influence on where

Spotify is today. During a live interview with

Fortune magazine at the Brainstorm Tech con-

ference in Colorado, he said, “The most inter-

esting part of Napster was the fact that when I

started downloading music, I could discover all

these people, and I right-clicked on them and it

said ‘browse this person’s collection’ and I got

everything else that they had. That got me on

Led Zeppelin, it got me on all these bands who I

probably wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.

And that’s exactly the kind of feeling we want to

now re-create but make it even simpler.” (And

legal, I’m guessing.)

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