Sean Parker's Email to Daniek Ek of Spotify
I particularly agree with all of his reasons for a desktop client instead of web interface.  It's just a better experience for music.  And there's an edge use case I hope Spotify will support at some point:<p>I find a cool remix on Youtube, but it doesn't exist anywhere else.  I use a flash downloader to get it, then another program to strip the audio out of it.  Now I want to load it into Spotify (Ok so far) and add it to a playlist to share with my friends.  So far it seems that sharing music like this (or say that I downloaded from Newgrounds.com) that's not in Spotify's catalog is not enabled.  Hope it will be someday.<p><i>"Final thought: I'm glad that you guys resisted the temptation to build a web basedapp. I remain a strong believer in the desktop client approach in music for a numberof reasons.<p>1. Speed/responsiveness of interface, and optimized downloading and streaming<p>2. Bandwidth savings of P2P architecture<p>3. Easy integration with hardware devices such as the iPod (ultimately you want tocontrol the interface to the portable devices where you can monetize moreeffectively by charging for download…)<p>4. There are vast repositories of "grey" content on people's computers across theworld. This content is often forgotten by the labels and publishers. The fact that youhave a client and P2P capability will allow you to someday unlock all of thiscontent…this goes way beyond the master music catalog that is licensed to you bythe labels. A big part of Napster was the joy of discovering various remixes, liverecordings and other obscurities that copyright owners have literally lost track of.<p>5. While you could have built a "thin" client that runs in the background and powersweb based streaming, why go to all the trouble of building and distributing clientsoftware when you could build the real experience? There is tremendous value incontrolling the client software real estate and it allows for a much snappierexperience."</i>