«In tech terms, we’ve gone from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. Nothing is for sale, because everything is available.»

John Seabrook dans le New Yorker

Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars, in 1999, to fifteen billion, in 2013. The iTunes store, the industry’s attempt, in partnership with Apple, to build a digital record shop, opened in 2003 to sell downloads, but that didn’t alter the downward trajectory; indeed, by unbundling tracks from the album, so that buyers could cherry-pick their favorite songs, Apple arguably hastened the decline. Legal actions against individuals—thousands of people in the U.S. were sued for downloading music illegally—only alienated potential customers. As bad as the bloodbath was in the U.S., the situation was even worse in Sweden. Pelle Lidell, an executive with Universal Music Publishing in Stockholm, told me that by 2008 “we were an inch away from being buried, and Spotify single-handedly turned that around.”

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