Spotify is a Swedish music streaming service founded in 2006 that offers over 15 million songs from major and independent labels. It gained one million paying users in Europe by 2011 and can now be accessed worldwide on computers and smartphones via apps. Spotify is funded by $10 monthly subscriptions and allows users to not only stream music but also purchase tracks and sync with iTunes. Napster was an early peer-to-peer file sharing service founded in 1999 that allowed users to freely share MP3 music files, gaining up to 25 million users and 80 million available songs at its peak. However, it faced legal issues and was shut down in 2001 for copyright infringement. After paying a $26 million settlement, Napster re-launched

1. Spotify and Napster...

2. Spotify is a music streaming service that was founded in 2006. It is a Swedish music
streaming service that offers streaming from both the ‘big 4’ and independent
music companies. It can be accessed by many different people in lots of different
countries and in 2011 it was announced that Spotify has one million paying Spotify
users in Europe. The use of spotify allows its users to access more than 15 million
songs, you can search via artists, albums, titles, labels and genres. Not only can
users just listen to music, spotify allows them to buy tracks and also sync with your
iTunes account. Spotify is funded by subscribed users who have to pay $10 per
month to use it.
Spotify is important in music industry nowadays as it allows artists to be able to
share their music with their fans and then get money from the songs/albums that
are brought online. It came into the market at the time when broadband was
introduced and the time when people have started getting smartphones. This
means that not only can people access it on computers, they can also access the
internet via their smartphones or via apps. This has helped to increase spotifys
popularity, and

3. Napster is a music-focused online service, it was founded in 1999 by John and Sean
Fanning. It was originally an independent peer-to-peer file sharing site, this allowed
its users to share audio files, mainly MP3 format music files. However, the company
ran into legal difficulties over copyright issues, so was eventually acquired by Roxio.
It got shut down by a court order in 2001, as it was seen as being a competition to
other official distribution companies and was violating the rules of copyright.
Napster agreed to pay music artists and copyright owners a $26 million settlement
for the passing of unauthorised uses of music. In order to pay the fees, Napster
turned its free service into a subscription service
At its peak Napster had around 25 million users and 80 million available songs.
Napster allowed its users to freely download copies of popular songs as well as songs
that were difficult to obtain, like songs from concerts, unreleased songs and older
songs. The service was seen as being very ‘user-friendly’ and it allowed music
enthusiasts to freely downloads MP3 file songs.