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

This is how the system works. This is a major lesson for all founders.<p>Don&#x27;t worry about &quot;regulatory.&quot; If your product matters, then you will be able to afford to solve the problem. If your product doesn&#x27;t matter, then &quot;regulatory&quot; will not be an issue. Just ignore it.<p>I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive, but it is exactly how the world works. It&#x27;s a really important lesson that I really wish I had learned earlier.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42677087">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42677087</a> (see top reply)

Had alpha access and can confirm that this was the case. Also stated it a few years ago [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33556181">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33556181</a><p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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 &quot;uplifting&quot; me intellectually back in those days. Truly great people.

When our American exchange student showed her iPod with 300 songs that she had _BOUGHT_ my friend almost fainted. We couldn&#x27;t believe it. We all had 10 000+ songs pirated.<p>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.

I never used Spotify but I was an early Google Play user, now Youtube Music.<p>And I&#x27;m a big fan of underground 90s, 2000s gangster rap. Living over here in Europe we had to pirate most of it because the stores just didn&#x27;t carry stuff like Dubee or Killa Tay.<p>So when I started streaming my old favorite rap tunes I noticed something very interesting. The Google Play copy of a Killa Tay album called Snake Eyes had the same abrupt encoding error as a copy I had downloaded from XDCC many years earlier.<p>It was basically evidence that Google Play were using the same pirated version I had acquired.

RIP grooveshark. Best of its kind, better than Spotify IMO. Just never managed to negotiate the licensing.

It&#x27;s interesting that Spotify pioneered things that we associate today with AI. There&#x27;s this, and then there&#x27;s the bands they created to generate music so they could reduce exposure to musicians who would receive royalties<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harpers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harpers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-ghosts-in-the-machin...</a>

Heh. I have some story around it.<p>+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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>I often looked at that conversation and brought up two lessons I learned.<p>First: anyone can come up with a magnificent idea, but it’s about execution and not daydreaming.<p>Second: even if you have everything you needed (there we had skills and resources) success is heavily context based.<p>Spotify could launch because they had friendly environment. My was hostile to license innovation, so we could do jack-

Joke by Emo Philips which is deep on many levels :<p>“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.”

The secret ingredient is crime

Could it be that Spotify had the licenses (mostly) in place at the time, but that the labels didn&#x27;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..

But it&#x27;s fine because now they have a lot of money and _checks notes_ contribute to the economy or something.

(2017) Discussion at the time (123 points, 63 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14307986">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14307986</a>

If they were paying the labels, does it matter?

Big corps steal what I have wrote on the net over the last 25 years. They even use it in ways I don&#x27;t agree with and sell products from it.

Isn&#x27;t this common knowledge? All the big companies got their start either through theft or copyright infringement.

The most alarming thing to me was that early versions of Spotify would scan your local computer to find music to share. I had to ban it from my office network. My employees had no idea that it was doing that and no way to prove that it was only sharing music.

Here is my comment from earlier regarding this very thing, and it seems like one of these is incorrect? Who can tell me the truth?!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42972523">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42972523</a>

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.<p>How modern technology should work, but doesn’t anymore.

This confirms my suspicions.<p>I used to use spotify a lot from 2010-2015. Around that time I started to buy CDs of the music that I really liked. This mean that I was finally getting legit high quality copies of stuff I had already.<p>It was then that I noticed that certain, more obscure albums on spotify had the same corruptions and odd encoding artifacts that my non-legit copies had, but the actual CD didn&#x27;t. (sometimes the rips were shit, some had CD dust skips, other had other corruption type errors)<p>So it makes sense.

I thought this was already a well known thing? Spotify historically set aside the money from those song plays for any legal costs incurred by playing without a contract.

The best players in every game, including business, are the ones who bend and push beyond the rules. Sometimes the rules evolve, sometimes you get too close to the sun.

Wow I did not know the Spotify dudes came from torrent tech

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.

Not surprised. Many successful video platforms started with pirated videos. Copyright is not a word in their dictionary. And once they get big enough&#x2F;have enough investment money, they suddenly become the good guys, activity engaging with copyright holders to sort things out.

I was in the spotify beta, can confirm it was all pirated mp3. The client would even upload all songs I had and they didnt to their cloud.<p>The worst part to me was the beta account was a lifetime premium which they just turned into a free account along the way, after snagging my mp3 collection.

They were all doing that. I remember deezer asking you to upload music if it were missing.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PHgc8Q6qTjc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PHgc8Q6qTjc</a>

Why did Spotify prosper and grooveshark fail?

Move fast, break things.<p>it’s been tech’s motto all along, it’s not a good motto, but it works cause the system is messed up

Does it matter?<p>I am concerned about the periodic attacks on Spotify, while the elephant in the room, YouTube, escapes unfettered. Everything from artist royalties to hosting the Joe Rogan show.<p>And as it happens, Spotify isn&#x27;t a FAANG or a US company, so isn&#x27;t that convenient?

all the big ones did it, Airbnb used to be spammers. lol.

Funny, I got downvoted to hell when I said this exact thing some while ago.

yeah I know, i had to C&amp;D them to take my music down forever ago