You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Malin Hay.

I'm joined this week by my colleague Daniel Cohen, who's written a piece in the latest issue of the LRB

about the streaming giant Spotify. Since its founding in Sweden in 2006, Spotify has transformed

the way that we listen to music, and it's now branched out into other media. 9.6% of you

will listen to this very podcast on Spotify. So thanks so much for joining me, Dan.

Thanks, Madam. I wonder if we could just start by talking a little bit about the history of Spotify because I'm not sure that all the listeners will be aware of it. So if you could just take us through kind of where it came from and where it's come to now. Sure. So as you said, Spotify was founded in 2006 in Sweden by two men, Daniel Eck and Martin

Lawrenson. Daniel, like, was very young at the time. He was 23. He knew Lorenzen because he had

Eck had sold the first company founded, an advertising company to Lawrenceon's company.

Didn't have any kind of background in music. I mean, I haven't actually read anything anywhere

that suggests that Daniel Eck cares very much about music for what that's worth.

But, you know, they basically spotted a gap in the market.

There's a Netflix dramatized series about the kind of founding of Spotify called The Playlist,

which isn't terribly dramatic, but tries to kind of dramatize this as much as they can. And

this was a moment Napster had launched in 1999, shut down with not too many years later.

There were other kind of file sharing services that followed Linewire, Khazar. And, you know,

some of these things were either found in Sweden or at least very popular in Sweden.

And the pitch was, you know, here is something that would be easier to use, kind of offer

quick access to music than the best legal alternatives that existed at that point, as

opposed to the most high profile.

One of that point was the iTunes store,

but that required people to pay per song and to kind of download music and it was doing

relatively well, but it alone clearly wasn't going to defeat piracy and it wasn't anything like

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