[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556181
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'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.
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.
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 "uplifting" me intellectually back in those days. Truly great people.