The History of Music Streaming Services

The first development in Music Streaming Platform occurred when pirated music hit the internet. The first platform for these pirated songs came from a website called Napster, a website created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999. The website gave you access to millions of songs for free. This came as a shock to the music industry and did everything in their power to get Napster off the internet. Before Napster, no one would have imagined an endless array of music in one area. John Perry Barlow told The Guardian that it is difficult to describe to people how much material was suddenly available as there really was no ramp up. In July of 2000, A federal judge in San Francisco shut down Napster, saying the online company encourages “wholesale infringement” against music industry copyrights.

The next advancement in streaming service was in 2003 with the Itunes store, which was developed by Apple for their IPods. This was not exactly streaming as all of the music in the Itunes library had to be paid for, but it did lay the groundwork for future Music Streaming Services. Apple would soon develop their own subscription music service called Apple Music in June of 2015.

A website called Last.fm was the next development. Last.fm started in 2002 and was not a streaming service but it created the algorithm that would be used by Pandora Radio to recommend music to its listeners based on what they listened to, compared to others who listened to the same. Pandora Radio came onto the scene next in January of 2005. Their brand was that they were "reinventing radio". At the start Pandora was a free site where you could listen to a radio-based on an artist or band you like. This experience would come with ads every few songs. Soon after they started a system that you paid for by the month, and it took away the ads. Pandora, unlike Napster, is able to do this because they give artists royalties for songs streamed on their website. 

Other streaming platforms that came out after Pandora was SoundCloud, and MySpace Music. These streaming services were do it yourself based, where people could stream music made by unknown artists. 

In 2008 a new subscription streaming service hit the market. Spotify combined all of the ideas from Napster, Pandora, and Last.fm, to create a streaming service that allowed the listener to create their own "radio" stations. It was 2011 before Spotify made it to the US but when it did, it blew up. As of the second quarter of 2020, Spotify had 138 million premium subscribers worldwide

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