Spotify and Napster. Kissing cousins?

Wow! Big Green Spotify has launched in the USA. Hallelujah! (Jeff Buckley Spotify link attached) All in all the reviews have been very good for the gang in Sweden. Tweets from Brit-Brit, Ashton, and Mark Zuckerberg changing his FB status to mention Spotify. Even Sean Parker calls it "The realisation of my Napster dream". And that brings me to the point of my post today - the one key piece that all of the tech bloggers out there seem to miss when doing their comparisons of Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody and others - it's shared DNA with Napster. That's right. Call it a distant cousin or a half-sister but Spotify and Napster Classic (not the New Roxio/Best Buy Napster) have more in common than Spotify and any other similar music service.

Nearly every review I have seen listing the pluses and minuses of various services gives Spotify a minus because it is a dedicated app and not a web app accessible from a browser anywhere. At the same time I did see one review which actually mentioned the speed of Spotify's streaming response (200 milliseconds). That post also failed to explain the fundementals behind Spotify's technology and therein its coupling to Sean Parker's Napster dream. Here it is.
Spotify is a peer-to-peer client. It's a bit torrent client, cloud-sourcing its media from every Spotify user that is online. This is where they pick up their speed on streaming starts and track changes. Every client, including mobile apps, have a cache which can be adjusted in your preferences. This stores a huge portion of your most played items and if you're a generous Spotify user and have lots of disk space you can up this significantly on your desktop machine.

So what happens is that when you click to hear that new Katy Perry tune, Spotify sources it from all of the other peers out there that have bits of that song cached and BINGO, 200 milliseconds later it starts playing. This is great for the vast majority of popular music but I'm not sure how much performance improvement it gives the long tail. Still, even those deep Root Boy Slim tracks kick off in a heartbeat.

So there you have it. That's why Spotify is an app and not a browser-based service. That's why Spotify is closer to Sean Parker's original Napster legacy than other services. That's why Spotify is inovative. That's why Apple is trying patent this concept... what? Yeah. Even Apple recently filed for a new patent to speed up streaming music by caching portions of the file to your local drive. Good luck with that, Steve.