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Comment by daleharvey | Hacker News Reader

Its depressing to see techcrunch's continuous berating of spotify, along with it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have an anti euro startup.

Spotify is a very young company that has managed to successfully enter a market with the highest of barriers to entry, released a technically superb application, and built up one of the most devoted fanbases I have ever seen.

Spotify are still young and they have masses of potential for revenue, I think at this point they just have to have a free service because people dont believe that a service this good could existe, I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.

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Its depressing to see techcrunch's continuous berating of spotify

First of all, I don't see this article as berating spotify. The headline (which is inconclusive at best, not a clear "berating") aside, the article is quite positive about Spotify's stats and their potential over the next few years.

along with it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have an anti euro startup

Secondly, this article is on TechCrunch EU, by Mike Butcher, which afaik had nothing to do with the TechCrunch US, Arrington-led "last.fm debacle" if you want to call it that. For anyone who knows Mike, it's hard to accuse him of having an anti-euro startup stance. Mike is probably one of the most active people in Europe when it comes to trying to convince everyone that Europe is a great place for startups.

TC-EU organises events, gets people together, writes about them, and generally does everything they can to help the european startup scene pick up.

To be fair I didnt check the author of the article, and I do agree that Mike has been a really good job promoting and helping local startups.

But I didnt make this comment on the article in isolation, there is a long list of techcrunch articles questioning spotify's viability ever since its inception, its being held to a much higher standard than it should be, and as as far as I can tell the only company really successfully getting any leverage against record labels I think they should be backed at every opportunity.

This. Spotify is amazing, they've done extremely well, and they will be huge.

> I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.

Any HN readers in the US that want to see Spotify for themselves, send me an email and I'll set you up with an account that will last you two weeks.

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