Brendan sez,

Spotify launched this week in America; last month I spent some time in Sweden with Daniel Ek, Spotify's founder, and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the founders of the Pirate Bay. What's interesting for Boing Boing, I think, is how intricately Spotify's commercial success is tied up with Sweden's history of file sharing. Spotify distinguishes itself in the streaming market through speed; this speed is possible by an elegant application of Bittorrent-like file-sharing technology. Ludvig Strigeus, who wrote uTorrent, was the chief architect of the Spotify beta.

Politically, too, the labels in Sweden would not have been incentivized to champion Spotify (which they did, with their bosses in London and New York) had they not been hit so hard and so early by file-sharing. Specifically with the Pirate Bay, they were fighting a battle for public opinion in Sweden; the Pirate Bay trial took place around the same time the labels were pushing to implement in Sweden a European directive on IP protection. One executive told me that, to agitate for stronger laws against file-sharing, they needed "services for the kids."