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Comment by dehrmann

4 days ago

I think they build the demo with pirated music, but it was licensed by the time customers started paying for it.

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dehrmann

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ninjin  4 days ago

Correct, the pirated music library was before they exited the closed Alpha.

  • cess11  3 days ago

    No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta".

    The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB.

    After they took in the entertainment oligarchs they cut out the warez and substituted with licensed material.

    • ninjin  3 days ago

      Not sure if it was called "beta" or "alpha" and "closed" is of course up to interpretation, but it was indeed by invitation. Swedish law at the time (still?) had a clause about permitting sharing copyrighted material within a limited circle, which I know Spotify engineers referred to as somewhat legitimising it. I also know for a fact that once the invite-only stage ended there was a major purge of content and I lost about half of my playlist content, which was the end of me having music "in the cloud". Still, this is nearly twenty years ago, so my memory could be foggy.

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    • dehrmann  3 days ago

      > The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years.

      Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds.

      The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was partially P2P, but I don't remember the timeline, it was only used to save bandwidth costs, and they eventually dropped it because network operators didn't like it and CDNs became a thing.

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