You can’t accuse Sean Parker of not thinking big when it comes to Spotify, the company he backed with $15 million in 2010. At SXSW 2012, Parker said that Spotify will become more important to music labels than iTunes is today. He says that it will do so in two years.
Bryan Chaffin, writing for The Mac Observer:
“If Spotify continues growing at its current rate in terms of subscribers and users, we will overtake iTunes in terms of the amount of revenue we contribute to the music labels in under two years” Mr. Parker said.
Parker’s first venture was Napster, a file sharing service that was shut down by court order because of the way it was used to trade pirated files. He then founded Paxo, a social networking service, where he was forced out by the company’s venture capatilist backers.
He was also the founding president of Facebook, where he was also forced out by the company’s backers after he was busted for cocaine possession. (No charges were filed.)
Parker then invested $15 million in Spotify in 2010. Spotify is an online music streaming service.
Participating in a Q&A session at SXSW 2012, Parker criticized iTunes for being slow. He said, “It’s this Web interface inside their client app, and you click buy, and then…”
He then made a swirling motion with his index finger to signify the spinning gear displayed while iTunes authenticates the purchase and begins downloading the file.
Parker believes that Spotify solves many of the problems he previously attempted to solve with Napster: no per song charges, internet discovery of music, etc.
iTunes is currently the largest music retailer in the world. Spotify is a music streaming service, with more similarities to Pandora than a traditional music retailer.
