Sean Parker's Email to Daniek Ek of Spotify | Hacker News Reader

Sean Parker's Email to Daniek Ek of Spotify

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240 pointsolivercameron87 comments

"Until now, no digital musicservice has met, let alone exceeded the bar set by Napster."

Did he ever use Napster? It was slow, search was terrible, most files were bad copies, there were viruses everywhere...

Napster was great because it was the first widespread way to get digital music. It was terrible as a platform, and quickly surpassed by its successors in every meaningful way.

Parker's got his reality distortion field going full blast if he thinks napster was a better music delivery system than Kazaa/Limewire/etc, or torrents. With Grooveshark and the like out there, saying Napster has yet to be surpassed is like saying a PII is superior in every way to an i7.

He came off as insecure in that email, to me. Constantly dropping how "great" Napster was and how nothing but Spotify could match its brilliance.

Again with this. Every time someone from the Silicon Valley pantheon does something interesting and it reaches HN, people feel the need to voice if they 'like' it or resist 'liking' it.

I think it's immensely interesting Parker and Zuck think in terms of experiences, not just UX, but the experiential realities of using a piece of technology. Every tech visionary I've met looks at products and services this way. This is an inside look into the way Parker thinks about technology, and the comments are just a bunch of people mashing the mythical 'dislike' button.

Emotions change thinking, I get it. Optimism and Pessimism are the two emotional reactions to an opportunity. Optimists imagine a positive reason for the event happening- superstition- (I need a hacker to help me with my startup, he's perfect), pessimists focus on the risks- paranoia- (I don't want to give equity to this guy). Understand how emotion directs thought and then see things as they are.

That being said, I think it's weird that the actions of successful people provoke emotional responses on this forum.

My response wasn't emotional, it was incredulous. Parker's a smart guy; I was surprised he made such a statement.

It would be as if Henry Ford, at 100 and whatever, claimed that no car had ever matched the Model T until the 2012 Lamborghini Aventador. It's just a clearly false statement, and something that inspires incredulity on the part of those hearing it, especially from a guy like Ford/Parker.

Amen! It would seem that Parker thinks he can ingratiate himself with promising companies simply by patting himself on the back. The sad part is, it appears to work

He is the ultimate "ideas guy". I believe his net worth is somewhere near $800 million. His value after Napster was his connections to venture capital companies.

Even in high school, he got in trouble for "hacking", which was nothing more than being a script kiddie (he used pre-built exploits to attack military and other computers).

>I believe his net worth is somewhere near $800 million.

With 7% of facebook, his net worth is quite a bit higher. Given a facebook valuation creeping up on $100B, his net worth is probably in the $4-7B range.

Does he still own 7%, or has he been diluted?

I'm sure it's been diluted, but he would have also had options. That's why I gave such a broad guesstimate. i also recall reading an interview with him a while back where they asked, "now that you're a billionaire, is a billion dollars cool?" or some such.

I'd be very surprised if he wasn't worth at least a couple billion.

Isn't that really valuable?

In fact, isn't it worth $800 million+ in this case?

sp - not impressed.

I was disappointed by the lack of an "a million dollars isn't cool..." pitch.

That being said, I think he did a fine job of endearing himself to the Spotify team by stroking their egos a bit and demonstrating that he's like minded. All you founders here on HN looking for co-founders or partnerships should take note.

I particularly agree with all of his reasons for a desktop client instead of web interface. It's just a better experience for music. And there's an edge use case I hope Spotify will support at some point:

I find a cool remix on Youtube, but it doesn't exist anywhere else. I use a flash downloader to get it, then another program to strip the audio out of it. Now I want to load it into Spotify (Ok so far) and add it to a playlist to share with my friends. So far it seems that sharing music like this (or say that I downloaded from Newgrounds.com) that's not in Spotify's catalog is not enabled. Hope it will be someday.

"Final thought: I'm glad that you guys resisted the temptation to build a web basedapp. I remain a strong believer in the desktop client approach in music for a numberof reasons.

1. Speed/responsiveness of interface, and optimized downloading and streaming

2. Bandwidth savings of P2P architecture

3. Easy integration with hardware devices such as the iPod (ultimately you want tocontrol the interface to the portable devices where you can monetize moreeffectively by charging for download…)

4. There are vast repositories of "grey" content on people's computers across theworld. This content is often forgotten by the labels and publishers. The fact that youhave a client and P2P capability will allow you to someday unlock all of thiscontent…this goes way beyond the master music catalog that is licensed to you bythe labels. A big part of Napster was the joy of discovering various remixes, liverecordings and other obscurities that copyright owners have literally lost track of.

5. While you could have built a "thin" client that runs in the background and powersweb based streaming, why go to all the trouble of building and distributing clientsoftware when you could build the real experience? There is tremendous value incontrolling the client software real estate and it allows for a much snappierexperience."

I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses youtube for music.

I often wonder how much google would save on bandwidth if they let me stream audio only versions of things. The vast majority of the time, I'm not even looking at the visual component of the "video", just listening to the song.

I suppose that this would add computational complexity, as well as additional storage, though. I'm not terribly familiar with the way that youtube stores video.

Can anyone chime in on this? "Extracting" audio from the video containers that youtube uses; how hard is this to do on the server side?

I mentioned this the opposite way around a little while ago (mute the audio in countries where it isn't licensed, rather than blocking the video outright), but the conclusion was generally that the video and audio are muxed together into a single deliverable. The file is almost certainly pre-generated (once for each resolution) to avoid the server-side costs of merging them together for streaming.

I guess in theory you could generate a 'demux mapping' and the client could request byte-ranges corresponding to only one channel, but that seems incredibly complicated, would generate huge requests, and is probably bypassable on the client-side anyway (more of an issue for my idea than yours).

I suspect the reason why they don't is because of legal concerns. It seems like the vast majority of the videos uploaded to youtube are videos that people recorded themselves, whereas the vast majority of mp3s that people share in almost any context are pirated music. There are probably certain small communities where there are plenty of user created mp3s shared, but it doesn't seem to be the case for a sharing platform of any significant size.

Grooveshark manages to get licenses for all these "gray" mp3s after the fact, but I doubt youtube would be able to do so as easily considering their larger market position would be more threatening to the labels.

It wouldn't add computational complexity, or use extra storage. Surely the audio is already stored as an mp3 or some similar format, after all wasn't mp3 invented to be the audio part of video (mpeg) files.

From wiki: "Audio in Flash Video files is usually encoded as MP3." On this page:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flv

My question comes down to how they're stored. [Obviously] I'm not an expert on video encoding or containers.

FLV is a container, yes? Usually, I'm guessing, MP3 and H.264. H.264 works out well for youtube because they can then also use this on their HTML5 video players.

So are the H.264 blobs and the mp3 blobs stored as discrete files, then packaged when a video is loaded and sent down the tubes? If so, then yeah, obviously, it would be really easy or youtube to serve "audio only"; probably "a few lines of code".

But if the MP3 and H.264 (again h.264 is an assumption) are stored as one [flv] package, they would have to be unpacked before being able to be sent down as their individual components.

Again, this is a shortcoming in my understanding of video containers, so maybe I'm missing the point on this completely. (As in: maybe "unpacking" an FLV is trivial)

Most videos uploaded in the past couple of years would be compressed as MPEG4 (h.264, specifically), but regardless of the video format the audio/video would be muxed into one file. If the video track consists of one still image, the impact (serverside compression, storage, delivery) of the video track would be minimal.

>I particularly agree with all of his reasons for a desktop client instead of web interface.

I have two arguments:

(1) Pandora is a great service (b) I also listen to Pandora on my phone a lot.

Muchos props to Pandora and their music genome project, glad to see it appears to be succeeding. However, I never really found it a particularly good music discovery service for my own tastes. I get more out of digging around Youtube, subreddits, Newgrounds, and other social music discovery sites. But clearly there's room for multiple approaches to the problem.

And yes, having a phone app that you can sync with your web-based playlists is a good workaround to the native desktop client issue. Just listen on your smartphone instead.

> I find a cool remix on Youtube, but it doesn't exist anywhere else.

Arggghhh, I'm in the same camp as you! I use a variety of music listening services (Spotify, YouTube and HypeM mainly) and I'd love to have one single source to do this all and share with friends. Two major themes pop up here:

1. Any company that could achieve this would effectively create a monopoly status - one which oddly I feel like I would support.

2. Meta data (tags, etc) for audio files is a mess. A side effect of this is the people trying to "game" the system (i.e. "Vocal Superstars presents a song played in the style of Rihanna's song") or reusing song names (i.e. any song that contains the word Love).

Have you tried fizy.com? You can make playlists of songs from grooveshark, youtube (and possibly more, I haven't tried other sites). I'm not involved in any way with fizy.com, just love the site.

Agree with you SkyMarshal on this point. His comments on P2P based software are well put. Its interesting to see that while the push towards web/cloud based aps is strong, how many companies are creating successful client products. It seemed a bit arcane when I first downloaded it, but the functionality and speed far surpasses web based services such as deezer

Pretty much sums up why I ended up ditching my subscription to Spotify after a year. Spotify is a really great service -- it's just that I truly hate Facebook and all it stands for.

Do you hate the concept of facebook or the realization?

Is there a difference? ;)

I use Rdio all day, 50/50 web and desktop (and desktop is just an Air wrapper around web), and I like it better than iTunes (which I like a lot). It's very responsive. The browser actually contributes the experience (history, back button). What am I missing here? I'm not convinced that the web isn't already the best place to build a music streaming application.

In all fairness, that was written in August of 2009... 2 years is quite a long time for browsers to improve their script engines. I'm certain you're also running the latest Safari/Chrome/FF whereas many of my friends and family still are not.

Parker's point you missed with native apps is "grey" music files existing locally on the user's computer.

They could be completely pirated/illegal but as a player that isn't your liability - yet you can provide functionality (playing), gleam usage information, meta data and of course still monetize/advertise over the top of the user playing their own songs.

You can't do that with web-apps (EDIT: unless you run a locker service, which is beyond scope of this)

I'm narrowly interested in Parker's observations about responsiveness and UX, which I think are unfounded; I think a web app is a better user interface than most desktop players.

I subscribe to Rdio for the value proposition of "I'm not going to buy more music, I'm just going to use this thingy to get it", so the notion of what files are on my hard disk is moot. I'm sure there's some independent dubstep artist who is Very Important to you that exists on no subscription service, but I assure you that my use case represents the mainstream: the fact that I even care about how much of Pitchfork's "Best New Music" is on Rdio already sets me far apart from the Lil Wayne fans that make up most of the market.

I hear you. The Rdio and Mog web interfaces are stunning...in many ways better than iTunes and Spotify. But I still feel there is an impermanence or fleeting feel to a web site when it comes to a music player.

And I do think incorporation of the unclouded content is a bona fide advantage.

Minor nitpick: the Air app has been deprecated, the desktop app is a native app wrapped around the web site. It also allows downloading purchases and matching your iTunes collection.

Minor detail: The Air app is still available and may work as a desktop solution on Linux.

http://www.rdio.com/#/apps/air/

(I personally love rdio and am completely confused by spotify.)

Matching iTunes collection only matches songs which are also available in Rdio's catalog. Everything else you'll still have to open up iTunes to play, and you can't even mix and match.

You sound surprised. How could that feature work otherwise?

Well in spotify your itunes music is imported into the spotify player.

The social aspects of Rdio are what I love a lot. The ability to follow people, view and subscribe to their playlists, collaborate on playlists, etc.

All of that makes for a better overall music experience, especially for people always on the search for new music.

Do you know how the availability of content on Rdio compares to Spotify?

I've encountered different stories about the availability of content, but I think it really boils down to what sort of music you listen to. Personally, I find Spotify has more of the things that I listen to - but like I said I've talked with friends (that have different taste in music) that claim the same about another service.

That said, I think everyone I've talked to agrees Grooveshark has the best coverage, but everything there is so disorganized (and nobody is really sure of the legality).

Grooveshark is legal (AFAIK), but their business model is somewhat sketchy. Content is peer-to-peer sourced, and if you don't want your music on Grooveshark, you'll have to file a DMCA infringement claim.

Various counts put Spotify at ~15m songs, and Rdio at ~9m songs.

http://blog.like.fm/top-5-music-streaming-services-reviewed

http://pansentient.com/2011/03/music-streaming-services-who-...

I'd agree with that, I especially found with metal that Spotify has a larger selection.

I paid $10 to spotify, and I still wasn't as happy as I am with what grooveshark gives me for free.

I have no idea if what grooveshark is doing is sustainable, but I've talked to others, and they concur.

I was pretty happy with anywhere.fm myself. Great user interface for four years ago, they let me upload my entire music library and listen socially with others. I had fun checking out TLB's extensive music collection and finding other people with interesting tastes and playing their music without even meeting them. Never experienced that kind of discovery before or since.

One of the most exciting YC companies and I could only imagine where they would have gone if they'd had a great funding round and participated in the Facebook platform revolution. They could've been everything Spotify already is before this letter was even written.

P.S. Congrats to Sachin on Connected being acquired earlier today!

I have found that Grooveshark actually has much better content selection, as well. Most of my listening is through Pandora One, but when I want a specific song I have never failed to find it on Grooveshark, but frequently cannot find it on Spotify.

Because many of those songs have not been licensed to Spotify or Grooveshark. But Grooveshark is much like Honey Badger.

Same here. Tried a friend's Spotify account, and I couldn't find any of the music I've been listening to recently. Most of the stuff I listen to is relatively new that I find through The Hype Machine. Seems to me like Spotify is going to be pretty slow to add new, non-mainstream music. /hipster

grooveshark is great but it could be better. What I like about Spotify compared to Grooveshark is their "playlist" feature where it shows top songs in the "US" or "UK". I know grooveshark offers that but most of the songs sometimes are really old while Spotify refreshes the list every so often. Also - I would use Grooveshark more if it had a better "ratings" feature for radio. When I thumb up/thumb down a song - it doesnt take into account why i did that (such as what Pandora does) and it keeps giving me music I dislike. I want to discover new music - Grooveshark allows this but a lot my friends don't have a Grooveshark account but still use the service w/o signin (now the ones who do use it - I love, since I can see what exactly they listen to and discover new music).

Grooveshark is great but I hate the interface. It feels like Myspace.

All I saw was,

"Blah blah CONGRATS!!! blah blah blah Facebook. Blah blah Zuck. Blah blah blah napster, blah blah blah napster, blah blah blah CONGRATS! Blah blah blah napster."

Making way to many "x is good because it is similar to Napster" arguments. He seems to be measuring anything against Napster or some artificial Napster of his mind (how it hypothetically could have evolved). Kinda stuck in the past.

I really wonder if he speaks like this IRL too. I had a pretty high impression of Parker till now, but if he can't say a good thing about Spotify without talking about how he did or thought about doing everything in Napster first ..

No, he is not anything like this letter in real life. He is happy to have wide ranging conversations without reference to his own history or accomplishments. I suppose that in the letter he was trying to establish credibility and rapport with the Spotify guys. It certainly worked out well for both of them in the end.

I think the real take away from this is not Desktop vs. Web Based its how Sean Parker conducts himself. This guy knows how to work the room, he's a great networker. I know very few that would have put the time and energy into writing a letter like that. It really shows what it takes to be a top notch entrepreneur. Fascinating stuff.

Napster - 12 occurrences, Facebook - 10 occurrences, Spotify - 7 occurrences

You - 48 occurrences

TL;DR: Sean Parker brags a lot about Napster.

That was more like TL;DR_I_DIDN'T_EITHER_BUT_I'LL_TELL_YOU_ANYWAYS.

IMHO it was a class on "How to get somebody interested on you to partner with them".

Anyone else perfectly content using Youtube as their primary music player and discovery service?

Where else can I instantly switch between the rarest Medieval Madrigals and the latest Reni Lane dubmixes as the mood suits?

Youtube is awesome for discovery, but meh as a music player imho.

Youtube is like MTV for the web - your music gets served with a video of some sort, whether you want it or not. Most people seem fine with that, but I just want the music.

I use Cull.tv -- they have a discovery engine built on top of the You Tube API. Nice interface too.

Guilty but satisfied. :)

quality is terrible.

I don't understand why he talks about web vs. desktop as it it's an either/or argument.

I agree with all the points he makes about a desktop client, but I still prefer Rdio- I can use the desktop client when I'm at my normal PC, but if I'm ever anywhere else, I can just fire up the web client. What possible argument is there against flexibility like that?

I believe their desktop app is just their web app wrapped in a container.

It isn't- I'm looking at it now. I have premium accounts with both Spotify and Rdio (so I can try them out and make a choice) and while the Rdio client might possibly be more HTML-oriented, it doesn't show.

Unfortunately, having seen "The Social Network", I can't help but read a lot between the lines here. And it's mainly in a voice that's both Machiavellian and threatening...

Maybe the level of enthusiasm is all positive and innocent: But reading the recent news, it seems that Spotify has tied itself closely to Facebook, but the monogamy only goes one way.

I picked up on that too. Just read the first line of every paragraph... "Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast... Ever since Napster I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify.... You know what's cool, a billion dollars is cool..."

Yeah, between the tone and the length, it doesn't seem like Parker has pure motives for Spotify.

Justin Timberlake just read a letter in my head.

Yep, and yech.

The responsiveness of their desktop client is why I ditched rdio for spotify

I'm surprised at how helpful Sean Parker was trying to be in the email, and the open offer to help.

Serious question for everyone who prefers web-based players:

The main reason that doens't work for me is b/c I'm a browser tab-a-holic. Anytime I open Chrome, Chromium, or Firefox, it's usually two windows with 5 to 10 tabs each. Stuff I'm working on or reading during breaks or whatever.

But sometimes I don't want the browser open, when I'm working on something that doesn't immediately require it, but I do want my music. Eg, I want my music decoupled from the browser. Hence I prefer a native app for music players.

Is that just an edge case, or anyone else have same or similar issues with browser-based players?

I have the same problem, and Fluid.app, Mozilla Chromeless/Prism, and similar desktop wrappers are pretty good solutions.

You could use a second browser strictly for music playback.

Yeah, unfortunately my tab problem applies to all my browsers - chrome, chromium, firefox, opera. Yes I'm starting therapy.

Already covered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077312

Having the option to listen to my music without having to install an app is the main reason why I choose Rdio over Spotify. Rdio's desktop app could be a lot better but I do appreciate the choice on how I get to listen.

Also there are a large amount of people that can't install anything on their work computers but can access a music website.

More interesting to me than the content of the email itself is the length. Jesus, that's a three-page email.

I have no idea how a long-winded email like this can be convincing. Effective communication is about quickly and concisely providing a message of substance, not writing 3 pages of fluff that could have by written in a paragraph:

Hey,

I love what you guys have been doing with Spotify. As you know, I had a very similar vision when I built Napster. I would love to extend my help in any of my area of expertise, whether it be the music business, the social space or potential investment.

Let's grab coffee and talk a little more!

Cheers, -Sean

Well, that clears up the 'Sean-athon.'

Spotify has blown me away in all the good ways. They have definitely significantly reduced the time I spend on YouTube and made iTunes obsolete for me.

Unfortunately, I've experienced one too many subscription stream service(Yahoo Music anyone?) only to see them go down under after a few years. Anyone know Spotify's future prospects in this regard?

Yes, they are superb right now. But what are the chances they'll increase their price from 10 bucks to 30 bucks or something even more ridiculous once they have peaked growth.

Grooveshark is the best, and it's completely free, plus no forceful sign-ins into Facebook.

The key word in that email is "sequencing". Which features to build and in which order.

Lessons learned: 1. Build MVP 2. Get in front of a bunch of users & iterate (build whatever else supporting features) 3. :)

I was waiting for something at the end like, "And one more thing. Drop the -ify. Just Spot. Cleaner."

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