----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Parker To: Da niel E k; Shakil Khan Sent: Tue Aug 25 13:49:35 2009 Subject: thoughts Daniel/Shakil, I've been playing around with Spotify. You've built an amazing experience. As you saw, Zuck really likes it too. I've been trying to get him to understand your model for awhile now but I think he just needed to see it for himself. Facebook has been in partnership discussio ns with various companies to fully integrate music download with the Facebook profile. Most of these deals would have resulted in the wrong user experience and I've done my best to stop them where they didn't make sense. In particular, there's no way that iTunes could enable the right experience on Facebook. Business development teams have a bias for working with the top player in a given market, especially when they don't understand that market. Unfortunately, partner ing with iTunes would not only have created the wrong user experience, it would have had disastrous consequences for the emerging digital music industry. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys sometime in early September, though I'm pretty excited about what you've done and I can't resist sharing some of my thoughts with you here first. Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast. While it's clearly lacking some important features (the social stuff you alluded to, etc), I think you've done a great job with sequencing. You nailed the core experience around which everything else can later be built. Ever since Napster I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify. I might have tried had I not been "side tracked" with Plaxo, Facebook, Founders Fund, etc. To be fair, I had very little desire to work with the record labels too soon after my somewhat unpleasant experience with them the first time around. (Though since then, curiously, I've become close friends with many of the folks who were once trying to destroy me…) So rather than dive in again, I adopted a "watch and wait" philosophy, hoping that the labels would either (1) come to their senses and try something new, or (b) forced to the brink of extinction, hire new management opening the door to radical new ideas. Since then, the reality of Napster, Kazaa, and all the decentralized P2P clients has sunk in and the overall industry has shrunk by more than half. What's clear is that the labels never quite understood the way people really consume/sh are/experience digital music. And they couldn't admit to themselves that this behavior pattern wasn't changing anytime soon. Rather, to create the right experience, the business terms of their standard licensing deals would need to change.