News that the Swedish online music service Spotify will be releasing an iPhone application has been generating quite a bit of a buzz online. Spotify provides an extensive online music library that is free to access and listen to. The free service is supported by adverts, or you can sign up for £9.99 a month for a premium account, which has no ads (you will need to have a premium account in order to use the iPhone application). Spotify is a great example of online music distribution done right. Sure, you can’t download the tracks, but it’s there to use for free, allowing you to ‘try before you buy’ from somewhere else, which is what I mainly used bit torrent trackers such as The Pirate Bay for. The question is, would there even be a Spotify if it wasn’t sites like The Pirate Bay?
Back in April, when The Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to a year in prison for their operation the site, the BBC published an interview with Mark Mulligan from Forrester Research. Mr Mulligan went on to say how Spotify was “one real example we’ve got of how the music industry is building a new (legal) business around new ways of distributing music”. The thing is, Mulligan fails to mention why the music industry is building this new business, or, more to the point, how they have actually been playing catch up to a digital distribution model that has been in full swing for almost 10 years. Piracy.
Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, says that “piracy is the sharp end of innovation”. In a recent article for the BBC, he wrote about how pirates are “highlighting a better way for us to do things; they find gaps outside the market, and better ways for society to operate”.
Site like The Pirate Bay have shown people that music, movies and all sorts of digital content can be easily distributed online (much to the dismay of the companies controlling and monetising that content). But without people taking these risks and, in this case, developing new methods of distribution, the chances are that services like Spotify would never have been considered, let alone be the working, productive business model it is today.