Spotify was ‘inspired by the Pirate Bay’
Monday, May 18th, 2009
At Music Ally we were thrilled when we heard that Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, had accepted our invitation to speak at The Great Escape festival in Brighton at the weekend. He didn’t disappoint.
Ek chatted openly on stage with Music Ally’s Paul Brindley for half an hour on a variety of subjects and revealed several fascinating facts about his company. The Telegraph covered Ek’s insights into future developments across mobile platforms and social networks, here. In fact the Telegraph has been all over Spotify recently.
However, one thing to add on the mobile front is that Paul Brown, Spotify’s new UK MD previously worked for Pandora, which developed 2008’s most popular music app on the iPhone; streaming music to the device and generating 200,000 downloads a month through affiliate links to iTunes. In terms of revenue and growth the iPhone app has been transformational and the same growth will undoubtedly happen to Spotify once they also hit the iPhone.
What else did Ek say? Well, on a slightly gossipy tangent, Brindley asked Ek where the inspiration for Spotify came from. “It came from The Pirate Bay” was the reply. Ek says that when he saw just how popular The Pirate Bay was becoming, and how easy it was to use, it formed the basis for his development model for Spotify; albeit as a legal service.
Ek also said that he had only spent GBP £5,000 in total marketing the Spotify service in the UK. With over a million users in the UK he has probably, pound per user, conducted one of the cheapest and most effective service launches since Google. (more…)
