Spotify's Beta Used 'Pirate' MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay (2017)

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark

> I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive

I'm more offended by the idea that we should sit quiet and not do anything just because the status quo set up the rules in their favor.

The immoral part here is not using pirated content to build the initial catalog. The immoral part is that their success came by aligning with the exploiters (the labels) and not the exploited artists.

There's several examples where this is true even in other industries, like Uber. That being said that is the wrong take away. Upon seing some unfair cases of crime not being put to justice, the response shouldn't be "everyone does it, let me do it too". In fact the idea that "everyone does" whatever crime you're considering is the first and foremost rationalization people make before committing crimes like tax evasion and so on.

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".

Worked for all the AI labs as well. Turns out you can steal the entirety of copyrighted works in existence on the internet without consequence if the resulting company is big enough.

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.

If an individual did this, or what Facebook did, they'd get a prison sentence. Should startup founders give themselves prison sentences?

Spotify only got away with it after the fact because they pivoted to a model that gives money to the people who wanted to put them in prison before. And Facebook got away with it becau it's big.

There maybe an inkling of truth for mass consumer markets where incumbents set up regulatory capture but it couldn't be more untrue for hard-tech companies or companies that work in dangerous domains where human safety is a concern.

> 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.

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.

I was given an account when it was in beta. the breadth and quality was amazing. I would listen to Merzbow box set, obscure country, every album I could think of. I studied so many eras that I'd missed or never knew about.

When it went public most of my playlists got emptied.

> 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.

My experience too. Early Spotify had the best music and I could find pretty much everything I liked, plus excellent recommendations. I don't think it was that the music I liked was particularly obscure or anything, it was just that it was all there. I just couldn't believe how great it was! Once out of beta (alpha?), it lost that magic.

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.

This reminds me of how someone at Riot helped with patched wine versions to run League of Legends because they themselves used Linux. Not sure how good the support is these days with the new anticheat and all.

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.

I was burning CDs for cash in my American High School before iPods. Once mp3 players with enough storage came out we started using those then iPods.

This was early 2000s and almost all kids using computers were downloading mp3s from Napster and Limewire. Once torrents came out I think the bar was higher for downloading tunes but music streaming services started to come out. Even before that lots of folks could copy their CDs and upload them to iTunes.

I think it wasn’t normal to buy 300 songs.

By 2009 music pirating in the US had been mainstream for 10 years.

I just checked Youtube Music and sure enough track 2 is still abruptly ended. I now own a physical copy of this album because I've been buying up all my childhood and teenage music, and my copy has the full song obviously.

It's so funny to me that a big "professional" service owned by Google is still 25 years later playing the same pirated music that I grew up pirating and listening to.

Of course this is a very low hanging example because it's such an esoteric artist but maybe there are more examples people haven't found yet.

The early version of Google Play Music asked for your MP3s, so you could have them in the cloud for streaming. I guess they did this for a baseline of data and music and now I wonder if this was an elaborate hack to circumvent legal implications. Should have read the terms back then.

That would be an interesting story!

Is the complete version 5:08 long, while the bad encoding is 4:28/4:29? Deezer and Apple Music have the latter, too.

I think people are missing that distribution without a license is the issue not where they got the stuff.

If Killa Tay is fine with them distributing a dodgy version...

i hope you're a fan of tommy wright iii from memphis

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.

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.

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.

I was actually just thinking about Grooveshark earlier today; April will mark 10 years since it was shut down.

AudioGalaxy was my favorite, personally.

Lala is the one I miss - apple bought it and summarily executed it.

I miss it. It introduced me to some of my favourite artists

Oh wow I always suspected discover style playlists and broken random algorithm were there to down rank higher royalty artists that I wanted to listen to.

We need to get back to owning our own data and music.

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.

Shoot back in 2001 Rhapsody was already doing this, I used to use it to stream music all the time for a monthly fee. Ironically in 2016 they rebranded as Napster. Spotify ended up winning in the end because they used a freemium approach instead, also Rhapsody was a bit too ahead of its time.

In your example, you gave up before even trying?

Be sure that almost everyone was hostile to Spotify very early on.

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

The secret ingredient is cybercrime

... 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.

Not if they were getting it from PirateBay and partook in also seeding the files others.

>legitimate

Logical? Yes. Legal? Not necessarily.

This sums up the history of Western countries.