![]() ![]() There’s a reason for that, as Gustav points out. ![]() That was our first lesson: user research is for understanding what people think they will do, not what they will actually do. See, user research is great, but you have to know what it’s really there for. So, once again, we had to ask ourselves something: Why would anyone pay for Spotify? How do you charge for nothing?Īnd indeed, when we surveyed our users, we discovered that $10 per month - the number we settled on after months of licensing negotiations with labels (more on those in a bit) - was a number literally no one said they would pay. Plus, our listeners already had access to all the music they wanted through piracy. ![]() First off, it couldn’t be free - you can’t click on ads without an internet connection - so it would have to be a paid service. A free, offline music app, one that could truly compete with the already-offline MP3 players, just wasn’t in the cards. Though it was theoretically possible to create a mobile edition of Spotify, there was still one major issue. Suddenly the idea of creating a piece of software that people could carry around with them everywhere didn’t seem so far-fetched. After all, Spotify didn’t have access to iPods or the other dedicated digital music players, and besides, at the time, most phones were equipped with only enough memory to hold a handful of songs. When we first released the Spotify desktop app in Sweden in 2008, the idea of creating an on-the-go version of that same experience seemed out of the question. Why was it so difficult to create Spotify for mobile even after we created the desktop app? Why were Spotify’s licensing deals such a game changer for us? Keep reading to find out the answers, and don’t forget to listen to the podcast itself to learn even more. In Episode 02 of our podcast series, Spotify: A Product Story, host and Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström chats with the engineers, executives, and other Spotifiers who helped make the mobile streaming revolution possible. TL DR Remember what life was like before smartphones? Remember manually having to sync your computer’s playlists with your iPod every time you added a few songs? One of Spotify’s core products, our mobile app, was designed specifically to leave all of that busywork in the past, changing how we travel with our music forever.
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