How Spotify made me stop stealing
The first product that made me say WOW: how Spotify beat piracy for a student, and the timing, tech and deals behind it.
My first conscious realization of a product that left me with WOW was Spotify. I have always listened to a lot of music, so I came across it pretty naturally.
Pre-Spotify, managing my playlists felt like a part-time job. First I’d source the songs (mostly pirated), then add them to my MP3 player, or later to a phone that was lucky to have 100 MB to spare. This whole loop was exhausting, but listening to fresh tunes was always delightful.
I first heard about it from a Mark Hoppus (Blink-182) tweet and got curious. But at the time it wasn’t available in Latvia yet. It launched here in 2013, and in July 2014 my cell provider LMT partnered with them to offer a sweeeet deal I could not refuse. Once it got to paying, even though I was a student, I was more than happy to pay.
What made it happen, I think, was a mix of timing, technology, go-to-market, and the deals behind the scenes.
Timing.
Internet connections became more widespread and accessible, especially here in Latvia, and smartphones were just becoming a real thing.
Technology.
Spotify made some clever product decisions to always keep the playback smooth: preloading the next song, keeping recently played songs on the phone (phone memory was growing too), and smart encoding that made even small files sound okay. On desktop, it went further. In its early years, listeners’ computers streamed the music to each other (P2P), which also freed up server capacity for mobiles. Spotify was phasing that out around the time I joined.
Go-to-market.
They made it easy to discover by offering it through mobile operators, with the first 3 months free. They knew it would be addicting. Paying took no extra effort, as it was included in my phone bill. Over the years I have paid well over 1,000 EUR, so that’s a good return on investment for them.
Deals.
It was a long road for Spotify to get that far, given the licensing stuff that needed to be cleared first and the people they needed to convince. The record labels, for example, got a stake in Spotify itself (reportedly close to a fifth of the company, combined), so the people who could say no became shareholders.
But from the user’s standpoint, to me at least, it felt very sudden. I had everything in one little app, on my phone and PC, and any song I wanted was just a search away.
So Spotify fully replaced the unpleasant part of my hobby and made it feel like magic. This was the first time I noticed a software product made me feel WOW, and thought about why. Kickstarting my interest in product development.
I write Wowcraft, about what makes products make you say WOW
Some random pieces I have found fascinating lately:
- Karri Saarinen (co-founder and CEO of Linear): I’ve been following Karri on LinkedIn for years and just now noticed his own blog. I love the minimalistic approach and the no-nonsense product focus.
- Itamar Gilad (product coach, author of Evidence-Guided): I remember where I was when I listened to his Lenny’s Podcast episode years ago. That’s how much it touched me. Recently I randomly came across his blog again. PS – I was running when I first listened to that episode.