ABSTRACT
The news site TechCrunch published an article on June 3, 2010 suggesting that the Swedish music service Spotify already had 30,000 users in the United States (Butcher, 2010). The timing of the article, a full year before Spotify would officially launch in the US, and the significant number of users in a market without legal access to the service, are both notable. Although Spotify quibbled with the report, other articles (Peoples, 2010) and fan forums like Spotify-Forum.com, BeSpotify, and Reddit indicated that a number of users in the US did indeed have early access to the service, either as beta testers, music industry insiders with trial accounts, expatriates from countries where Spotify was legal, or through proxy servers or spoofing techniques that fooled Spotify into thinking they were legitimate users. It seemed clear, as Billboard noted: “Americans can’t wait for Spotify to arrive to their country” (Peoples, 2010). The excitement around the service’s launch, resembled the fervor that usually accompanies the launch of a new album, the sale of concert tickets, or the swapping of leaked files online from a favorite band or artist. Fandom, in Spotify’s case though, was directed less at a particular album or artist and more toward the technology, toward the means of accessing the music.
