Spotify's Beta Used 'Pirate' MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay
100 comments
·February 25, 2025consumer451
caseyy
I think you’re not accounting for survivorship bias.
For example, Grooveshark was a direct competitor for Spotify with similar apps and features around the same time[0]. It got sued out of existence by the music industry, and back then quite a lot of music on both had that bootleg audio quality that sure points to piracy.
consumer451
I am not young, and I was around for both. What was the difference?
I remember going to Europe from the USA around 2012, and everyone was already using Spotify. Their music experience was vastly superior to ours. IIRC, they were based/avail in countries with really loose music copyright laws. Was that what made the difference? They grew huge where they could, before the hammer came down? Then too big to fail?
Again, IIRC, when the US music labels wanted to shut them down, they instead said: "hey, why don't you just buy a big piece of Spotify. We are already your distro. F the artists." I remember thinking that this was a gangster move. (btw, I still refuse to subscribe to Spotify.)
RachelF
Even established companies use pirated software.
The sounds in Windows XP were created in a pirated version of Sony SoundForge, and were only detected because of the metadata in the .wav files.
I guess companies can get "too big to sue".
kortilla
This strategy worked out well for FTX
consumer451
That's not along the same line of thinking.
Theranos was also a fraud. I am not talking about outright fraud.
I am just some shmoe, so I would love someone else to put this more clearly. Is what I originally posted intellectual property/regulatory arbitrage, vs. fraud?
Is there a better way to state this difference?
andy_ppp
As with everything there’s lines you can bend and lines you just don’t cross. Gambling with your clients’ deposits is always going to mean jail time. Timing is also important, for example the US basically has given up on consumer finance protection laws and white collar crime being a thing, so while big companies can still sue you the government will let you get away with anything you like. Go for it!
qwertytyyuu
I mean Tesla self driving advertising is as much of a fraud as theranos… maybe it’s not as bad because it wasn’t a medical device?
barrenko
If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a couple houndred millions, you own the bank.
bofadeez
Tell that to Kim Dotcom
AlexAltea
He launched Megaupload two years before Dropbox. Kim could have pivoted there, then expanded to docs/collaboration. Yes, hindsight is 20:20, but in theory it would have been possible moving from a piracy-centric business model to regular cloud storage/collaboration for businesses and small teams.
Regulatory does not matter if your product does not matter. Megaupload did matter, and did not solve the regulatory problem or change the business model.
Maybe it came too early for the solution or alternative business models to become apparent.
consumer451
Hmm, this is an interesting counterexample.
What was the difference? Did not have the correct investors? Did not have a unique enough product?
I would assume the latter. However, this is an interesting topic for discussion.
KingOfCoders
He knew that and talked about and used alledgedly illegal files. He should just not do the drugs himself and fire everyone who eats from the forbidden fruit and he would be fine.
Kwpolska
Spotify did illegal stuff in beta, but they fixed it since then. Megaupload never cared about the law.
notnaut
Compliance and capital vs. defiance and disaffiliation.
bofadeez
Devil is in the details. Teenagers tend to appreciate things that can seemingly collapse a complex topic into a binary black and white thing. The real world is nuanced.
tacker2000
In another sense, its the same with Uber and Airbnb, etc…
consumer451
Exactly. YouTube was one of the OG examples.
Same with LLMs and copyright, I suppose.
ninjin
Had alpha access and can confirm that this was the case. Also stated it a few years ago [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556181
Many of the early core developers were my seniors at university and the story I heard was that the early Spotify music collection was the superset of the staff's personal music collections. It was great, but once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since.
One anecdote that I have not stated before. In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user. Not sure how remarkable this is these days with Wine becoming so much more powerful, but it absolutely was in 2008.
I also remember sitting in the university staff lounge with some of said seniors and trying to mentally reverse engineer their implementation. Got most of it right; it was great fun and I owe said seniors a lot for "uplifting" me intellectually back in those days. Truly great people.
touristtam
> once they went legit I lost half of the content in my playlists and learned a valuable lesson about the superiority of files on disk and have not used Spotify since
I've had a similar experience where Spotify lost the license for some of the music I was listening the most at the time. That definitely broke the spell early on.
szszrk
> In the early days FreeBSD support via Wine was great due to one of the core developers being a fellow FreeBSD user.
I used a bit later on linux via Wine and it was working just fine. One of the best Wine experiences I had back then.
I still remember my confusion when native linux client came out and crashed, produced choppy output or had issues to start at all... Weird times.
fx1994
I'm old school, I will never store anything in somebody's "cloud", rather buy X TB of disks, setup backup/sync to secondary location and I'm happy with that solution for more than 15 years.
SpicyUme
Man I don't remember if it was alpha but I had pretty early access. That story might explain why some songs I remember disappeared, was this in about 2008-09? As I recall I got a ban or a timeout for not using it in Europe but I originally registered with a UK postal code.
pastage
Looking through emails I think somewhere between 2007-2008. We built a Spotify pirate clone when they went legit, it died because we were not good at being 1337/illegal, the cloud was not trusted, and most importantly Spotify was just easier (and legal).
croon
Yeah, I had the same experience, found a comment from 2018:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057725
Thinking about it I also remember a client I can't remember the name of that was mainly an indexer/file explorer on top of samba shares that just traversed everyone on the same subnet on SUNET that many used as a pseudo extension of their own library, sort of proto-cloud storage.
designerarvid
When our American exchange student showed her iPod with 300 songs that she had _BOUGHT_ my friend almost fainted. We couldn't believe it. We all had 10 000+ songs pirated.
In ~2009 everyone in Sweden pirated music. Using The Pirate Bay was considered mainstream and the cool kids in my high school were using more sophisticated sites. We thought Spotify was interesting because of the streaming. It was also free back then as there were no ads yet. No one even knew what IP rights were.
Gud
One cool feature that early Spotify had is that you could put your own MP3s in your playlists and Spotify would synchronise them across your devices.
How modern technology should work, but doesn’t anymore.
lblume
I agree that would be what good software would do, but what incentives would Spotify have to do that? They would have to pay for hosting and are possibly legally responsible for the file content, which could itself be illegal. And most people today who use Spotify don't extensively listen to music via MP3 files.
tw04
RIP grooveshark. Best of its kind, better than Spotify IMO. Just never managed to negotiate the licensing.
bee_rider
Is Grooveshark the Spotify alpha they are talking about in this article?
I recall being pretty confused by Grooveshark. It seemed… like, I mean, it was possible to stream a ton of music for free, so it had a vaguely pirate-y feel to it. But then, at the time YouTube also hosted a ton of music and other content seemingly without any license.
It was a weird time. IIRC lots of people seemed to think streaming was somehow distinct from downloading a file.
tombert
Grooveshark was great.
I understand the need to protect intellectual property, and much as I hate how it is run in the US, copyright it vital, but it’s sad that platforms like Grooveshark are casualties of our system.
In around 2009, I remember my dad used to listen to music on his laptop a lot, but getting songs synchronized between different computers was a pain in the ass before the days of Plex or Jellyfin and the like. When I introduced him to Grooveshark, it was sort of huge for him; he started making tons of playlists, and it was easy to listen to stuff everywhere. IIRC he figured out how to install Flash on his early Android phone so he could stream Grooveshark from his car.
bsimpson
I think I met the founders at TechCrunch Disrupt in about 2008 and their reaction to "what about licensing?" (the most obvious question for a streaming service) was essentially "lol."
I'm not surprised they disappeared.
pockmarked19
Not just disappeared. In fact someone literally died…
pastureofplenty
I was actually just thinking about Grooveshark earlier today; April will mark 10 years since it was shut down.
theblazehen
I miss it. It introduced me to some of my favourite artists
mock-possum
Lala is the one I miss - apple bought it and summarily executed it.
xlii
Heh. I have some story around it.
+20 years ago I had a pop-star manager as my client. Super successful, resourceful with a business card holder filled to the brim; yet always on the lookout for opportunities.
One day we were chilling and I drawn a concept of a novel music platform. It wouldn’t distribute music (people could download it whatever) but instead granted unlimited license for a fee, and then based on telemetry tracking divide fee between artists and take some percentage as a profit.
We discussed it in detail and shrugged off as impossible to execute. Few years later Spotify came out and yet it took it 5 years to enter national market (due to licensing issues that came up during conversation).
I often looked at that conversation and brought up two lessons I learned.
First: anyone can come up with a magnificent idea, but it’s about execution and not daydreaming.
Second: even if you have everything you needed (there we had skills and resources) success is heavily context based.
Spotify could launch because they had friendly environment. My was hostile to license innovation, so we could do jack-
pastage
Spotify did not have a friendly environment, it was more passion that made it possible. I hope they can stand up against the giants like youtube, apple etc.
I have no love for Spotify but they were pretty revolutionary when they released mainly because they managed to go legit so early.
RockRobotRock
The secret ingredient is crime
b3lvedere
One cup of developing fast Two cups of breaking things Three cups of ignoring licensing Four cups of breaking laws Five cups of huge risk Six cups of money Seven cups of lawyers Eight cups of success
helloplanets
Had to make this into a country ditty on Suno.
b3lvedere
Never had a comment translated into song. That was awesome! Thank you! :)
vincnetas
... get your first millions (or any other digit) any way you can (just don't get too greedy) and then continue like regular business. I rarely meet self made people who do not have some kind of blank spaces in their past, even though now they are reputable members of capitalism.
vanviegen
Could it be that Spotify had the licenses (mostly) in place at the time, but that the labels didn't happen to have a nicely wrapped zip file of all of their catalogues ready to hand over? In that case, using pirated music seems perfectly legitimate..
rootnod3
Not if they were getting it from PirateBay and partook in also seeding the files others.
jeffwass
Joke by Emo Philips which is deep on many levels :
“I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked God for forgiveness.”
bobloblaw22
But it's fine because now they have a lot of money and _checks notes_ contribute to the economy or something.
oefrha
Around 2012 I got some credits for Amazon Music (or whatever it was called at the time) so I bought and downloaded a couple of international albums. Then I noticed tracks in a single album could have three different bitrates. Not definitive proof that the files were ill-gotten but very fishy.
bschne
From Wikipedia:
> All tracks were originally sold in 256 kilobits-per-second variable bitrate MP3 format without per-customer watermarking or DRM
Don‘t remember 100% but wouldn‘t the variable bit rate explain this?
harry8
Why did Spotify prosper and grooveshark fail?
This is how the system works. This is a major lesson for all founders.
Don't worry about "regulatory." If your product matters, then you will be able to afford to solve the problem. If your product doesn't matter, then "regulatory" will not be an issue. Just ignore it.
I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive, but it is exactly how the world works. It's a really important lesson that I really wish I had learned earlier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677087 (see top reply)