In the early 2000s, after Napster had blown up the old model for buying and selling music, an idea took hold. It was repeated often enough that it became a cliché: people could be tempted away from piracy, the argument went, only if it became significantly easier to access music legally than to download it illegally. In the event, it is Spotify – with more than 500 million users, 200 million of whom pay for a monthly subscription – which has been primarily responsible for making this happen. It’s both surprising and unsurprising, then, that the company started up in a country where music piracy was more prevalent than anywhere else in Europe. In the mid-2000s, it was estimated that 1.2 million people in Sweden – out of a population of nine million – had shared pirated files. Three file-sharing services, Kazaa, μTorrent and the Pirate Bay, had Swedish roots. For at least some of the people involved, piracy went along with an ideological commitment to the free transmission of information: the Pirate Bay was set up in 2003 by Piratbyrån (the Bureau of Piracy), a Swedish collective critical of copyright law. Sweden’s Pirate Party was founded three years later, on a platform of providing ‘access to free communication, culture and knowledge’. It won 7 per cent of Swedish votes in the 2009 European elections.
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