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.