Walt Mossberg interviewed Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, and investor/adviser/board member, Sean Parker (also a co-founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook).
Spotify now has a catalog of 18 million songs, growing at 10-20,000 per day. Parker indicated that when he ran Napster, he had ALL the music including “music people didn’t know even existed.”
It required two years of negotiations with the music labels before they could launch in the U.S. The labels were afraid that Spotify would encourage people to stop buying music. But Spotify argued that many had already stopped and were pirating music. Spotify would “convert” the pirate to become a legal consumer.
Spotify allows users to discover music and build a playlist for free. But if users choose to get access via mobile or share their playlists, the only way they can do so is to become a paying customer.
The value of their service is that they have 700 million playlists.
Spotify is now the second largest revenue stream for artists in Europe. Parker says “there was some indication” that Apple wanted to keep Spotify out of the U.S.
Walt Mossberg interviewed Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, and investor/adviser/board member, Sean Parker (also a co-founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook).
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