How can you say that? Spotify held a moment early on where it was built upon pirated mp3s. At that time it was the easy way to listen to anything for free.

I remember the time where there was no party without constant Spotify ads running over the speaker, that's the only type of free account I know of.

Other than that my point was how incomplete it is and always was. It could be nice as additional catalogue to my music, but for me it's missing to many of my favourite songs to use it as main driver.

Edit:// in Switzerland downloading music for private use is no crime. So the initial situation was different I guess.

Spotify is from Sweden, not Switzerland.

And they didn't start with illegal MP3s. They did have an ad-supported free tier from the start though. But it was not illegal. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

I think it's napster you're thinking of. That was an illegal sharing platform and now a mediocre paid service.

It might be Grooveshark that they're thinking of, it was notorious for quickly reuploading content that was taken down by DMCA requests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark

Were the claims made in 2017 shown to be false? I haven't yet read the book - how widely accessible was the beta?

https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4136/Spotify-TeardownInsid...

No idea where Spotify is from. My point was we didn't need it here in Switzerland as much as collecting music from the internet was a normal and legal thing long before that.

Apple Music has a ton of smaller/niche artists and songs that other streamers refuse to pay for. I’ve never found anything missing.

Citation needed.

I think you're thinking of Grooveshark.

I miss Grooveshark :)