UPDATED 07:28 EDT / OCTOBER 25 2010

Sean Parker Talks Limitations; Users Scream Extortion

Spotify investor and Napster co-founder Sean Parker attended a discussion regarding his plan for the ever-popular U.S music streaming service. Apparently though, a Spotify dedication towards a more healthy customer-business relationship had slipped out of his mind for the sake of a nobler goal. That goal is to imaginatively exchange blows with hacking on users’ hearts, and fix the music industry’s broken distribution system, as he pointed out,

“His [Parker’s] plan with Spotify is to provide an unlimited platform for streaming on the desktop, but the client holds all its music files locked with the program. You can’t move it to your iPod. You can’t listen on your iPhone. You’ve just got unlimited streaming within a closed environment.”

Parker has stated, perhaps not too contradictorily, that the corporate battle with piracy is already lost. His advice that content providers need to embrace this may even be fully accepted by some, including some in the music industry, but that’s only one part of the equation. In an equally engaging segment of the conversation, he noted his plans to overcome piracy with regard to Spotify – in which he invested $14.86 million 2 months ago – which are laid out pretty accurately in the quote above. These depend on listeners who’ll “get addicted to your [their] jams” to their in-computer libraries. Those listeners will have to subscribe to Spotify’s services in case they’ll  “addictively” need to get access to these libraries on their mobile devices, and will be willing to pay for it.

Parker’s assumption that users will exchange piracy for greater accessibility and convenience depends rather clearly on one sort or another of social engineering, and the outlook hackers won’t find imaginative ways to get around this system in the near future. Spotify may be a mighty attempt to realize his dreams with Napster, and after a more than hinted at declaration of the music industry’s ‘fault distribution system’, Parker is apparently eager to fix it.

This may just be what Parker’s been looking for all along, though the battle grounds are still bloody stateside.  Spotify’s UK headquarters have been safe grounds for the music service, which is hopeful in its expansion across platforms, most recently HP’s webOS.  However, U.S. users are still unable to directly access the application, making Parker’s latest statements all the more poignant.


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