Sean Parker Emails Spotify CEO Daniel Ek  

[August 25th, 2009] 

Facebook has been in partnership discussions with various companies to fully integrate music download with the Facebook profile. Most of these deals would have resulted in the wrong user experience and I’ve done my best to stop them where they didn’t make sense. In particular, there’s no way that iTunes could enable the right experience on Facebook. Business development teams have a bias for working with the top player in a given market, especially when they don’t understand that market. Unfortunately, partnering with iTunes would not only have created the wrong user experience, it would have had disastrous consequences for the emerging digital music industry.

and

At Napster, I never got a chance to implement any of these really interesting second generation social features. We were stuck with our rudimentary first generation product. The interface we built was “utilitarian” – and that’s putting it nicely. It was an atrociously ugly beast of a product that served its limited purpose just well enough to be serviceable. We had every intention of cleaning it up, developing next gen social features, and implementing advanced P2P technologies (striping, auto-selection of source, etc), but we never got around to it because of the demands imposed upon us by the lawsuit.

Kind of amazing how Sean Parker has come full circle, starting with music at Napster, helping to build Facebook, and then back to music with Spotify integration into Facebook. I wonder what would have become of Napster if it had survived the lawsuits. Would it have eventually become what Spotify is, and then integrated with Facebook?

Sean Parker is a smart guy. You should definitely read the whole email. See also: Lunch With Sean Parker.