Spotify – how it all started

Spotify – how it all started DevCon 2010 Andreas Ehn ehn@a8n.se Twitter: @ehn CC0 and in the public domain to the extent possible

Spotify All the world’s music anywhere, anytime Online music streaming Better than piracy

Background Founded spring 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon Got going August 2006 with a small tech team mostly from KTH, six people in total Launched private beta for friends and family in May 2007

About 20 people by summer 2008 First external ﬁnancing round in summer 2008: Northzone and Creandum Launched publicly in October 2008 About 40 people at launch

August 2008

Second external ﬁnancing round in summer 2009: Wellington and Horizons Mobile apps released in fall 2009 (ﬁrst iPhone and Android, then S60)

Almost 10 million users in seven markets 9.5 million songs Ofﬁces in Stockholm, Oslo, London, New York, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam About 220 people in the company

The challenge Music is ubiquitous and in practice essentially free on the Internet The music industry’s response – DRM and lawsuits – alienates customers and causes more problems for legitimate users than pirates

The opportunity Despite music’s being free, the user experience was bad Accessing music from different places and devices was cumbersome User’s should be willing to pay – with their attention or their wallet – for something better

The solution Move from a distribution model based on ownership to one based on access Make it ubiquitous Make it free or signiﬁcantly better than free alternative to create an incentive to pay

Scalable backend P2P Internet client client client Spotify protocol access access point point Spotify backend mostly HTTP user user tracker search storage service state selection of backend services (some are independent; other have interdependencies)

Instant playback

Efﬁcient distribution

Conclusions Fighting what users want is a losing game “Don’t bet against the Internet” – Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt Identify what’s bad about the current user experience and ﬁgure out how to improve it – without losing the good parts Spend your marketing dollars on product development

Thanks! Andreas Ehn <ehn@a8n.se> Twitter: @ehn CC0 and in the public domain to the extent possible (photos, screen shots, trademarks and logos owned by Spotify of course)

Spotify – how it all started

by Andreas Ehn on Sep 30, 2010

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