Daniel just posted about the 14-year anniversary of Spotify coming to the US:

At the time, we weren’t sure if people here would embrace it the same way they had in Europe. We launched invite only because we didn’t know what kind of demand to expect, or honestly if we were even ready for it

London Calling

I had the chance to discover the magic of Spotify twice. Soon after arriving at EMI Music in 2008, we were digging deep into the fan behavior around music — story for another day — when an employee in our London office said we needed to see Spotify. It was amazing, exactly how you wanted to get music as a fan, and frustrating. Frustrating because there was no path to build Spotify as a major label. Short list:

• Anti-trust meant major labels couldn’t really collaborate on anything

• The majors didn’t trust each other

• Recorded/publishing rights splits led to so much incentive misalignment, the majors would rather sue themselves and each other than coorperate

• The majors took the wrong lessons from the iTunes deals and Napster

So, even after connecting with Daniel and thinking he was on the right path, there was nothing to do other than to get our music onto Spotify. Which was a bummer, because building a competing product with the backing of the majors would have been a fun adventure.

Open Graph and Spotify

Fast forward a few years and I was working on the Game Platform at Facebook. Open Graph was about to explore what it would mean to share actions on News Feed with 3rd parties and Spotify was just arriving in the US, so they were an obvious partner. What would happen when you could share what you were listening to with your friends?

Well, since many of my friends were music executives, producers, and A&R, what it turned into was an infinitely deep game of one upsmanship, unexpected connections between songs, and incredibly storytelling.

It was glorious

Of course, it didn’t last. Like a lot of public sharing, this all worked better in private groups or inside more specialized platforms.

As happened here — when the Ampersand office playlist went horribly, horribly wrong.

Since then Spotify became one of my most used products — and that was before they bought The Ringer!

Streaming — like iTunes before it — has challenging economics for creators because everything has the same price. At EMI, I worked with the incredible Ian Rogers to bring an incredible 20th Anniverary reissue of “Paul’s Boutique” to super fans, and since then Pateron has helped many artists explore that approach. There’s still more of an opportunity there, to de-average music, but that’s a story for another day.

But what Spotify has done is bring an incredibly ability to discover and engage with music to the world. And that is pretty awesome.