After realizing that, Spotify’s mission was set: if we could provide those same things with an even better user experience while still generating revenue, then, and only then, did we have a shot at success. The appeal of music piracy for most people, after all, wasn’t to deliberately sabotage the record industry or cut off a revenue stream for artists - it’s that it was free and relatively convenient. In other words, when it comes to guiding your product strategy, our first lesson is an important rule to live by: convenience trumps everything. And then I think everyone would turn to that.

In the very first episode of the podcast, Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek remembers considering what it would take to beat piracy at its own game when first conceiving of the company:ĭaniel: I guess if you could take the concept of downloading all the world’s music, like you have on Napster and Kazaa, for a free price or a very low price, and you married it with the user experience of iTunes, so that it would feel like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive - that would be a much better experience than piracy. It was also, most importantly, absolutely free. But, hey, it was pretty convenient and low risk, all things considered. Sure, download speeds could be painfully slow, the programs were a bit janky, and that album you pirated might turn out to be low-quality, incomplete, or covertly smuggling a virus along with it. With peer-to-peer technology, all it took was an internet connection and some software, and you could be moments away from nabbing a song for yourself, with almost no chance of getting punished for it. No longer did you have to physically steal records, rip radio onto a cassette, or even burn a CD. At this point, music piracy wasn’t a new phenomenon, but it was a newly popular one. And, of course, please check out the podcast yourself to hear even more about how Spotify became, well, Spotify.

So read on to learn how Spotify had to completely rethink peer-to-peer (P2P) networking to improve our user experience, and why everyone needs a bit of magic to stand out from their competitors. In the first episode of our podcast series, “ Spotify: A Product Story”, host and Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström walks through how the app (and Spotify in general) came to be - and the product lessons you should take away from that journey. But sitting at the core is our flagship product, the one that started it all: the desktop app. TL DR Over the years, Spotify’s brand has expanded to encompass a number of products, from mobile apps to web players to car things.

Spotify free download for desktop