Spotify Deserves the Hate

It was all the fault of Scandinavian social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sweden became a global center for music piracy largely through a perfect storm of universal and high-quality broadband, well-funded music education, and assertive personal privacy laws. Something had to be done. Record industry CEOs talked about the Nordic country as a lost market. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) leaned on Congress to apply pressure. Audible in the background was the rise of Piratbyrån, a kind of underground Swedish think tank obsessed with copyright liberation, which unleashed a new BitTorrent search engine — The Pirate Bay — that threatened global consequences.