"Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days." "Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, anoth

"Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days." "Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than video files, not because of a dream of saving music. In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site, and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would take off across Europe and then the world." https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-napster-to-spotify https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-n...