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Digital
Sean Parker denies Zuck feud
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 19 October 2011
Sean Parker has reiterated his denial that he recently got into a shouting match with Mark Zuckerberg over the forcing of new Spotify users to sign up to the streaming service using their Facebook accounts – the first time it having been done by a spokesperson.
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Parker said: “I love this story. It shows the potential for one little irrelevant, largely incorrect rumour to spark this large explosion of media. Mark and I were discussing this, but we weren’t having a yelling match on Hollywood Boulevard”.
On the subject of Spotify’s integration with Facebook, he being an investor and advisor to both, he added: “The obvious thing is it gives [Spotify] access to Facebook’s roughly 800 million users and it allows music to go massively viral. The social graph has always been a great promulgator of information. We didn’t see it as a network of profiles, we always saw it as a way to promulgate media. You saw this with videos from YouTube. But because of licensing issues there was no way to enable that same virality with music”.
Elsewhere at the Summit, Parker said he’s “not actually sure why any artist would sign with a record label” (despite him being linked, earlier this year, to a bid to buy Warner Music), and he claimed that Spotify is “an attempt to finish what I started at Napster”.
Watch Parker’s discussion in full here:
