Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

This Isn't the Spotify-Facebook Linkup You're Waiting For

Spotify and Facebook ought to be natural partners. But until Spotify actually starts doing business in the U.S. they have to work at arm’s length.

So for now, this will have to do: Spotify design head Rasmus Andersson is leaving the London-based music service and going to work for Facebook in California.

There are plenty of streaming music services out there, but Spotify gets heaps of praise for two things: Super-fast performance and really good design. So this is a very nice hire for Mark Zuckerberg and company.

Hard to say what it means for Daniel Ek and the Spotify gang. Andersson certainly heaps praise on his former employer in a blog post:

The time with Spotify has been the best in my life so far; the people, the laughers, the time we cried out loud, the times of frustration and the times of pure happiness. Being part of and seeing a seed of a world-changing idea grow up to be a industry changing, world spread “thing” is something which can’t be explained. An awesome feeling.

Then again, Andersson has been at Spotify for four years, so he has likely vested all his options. So you wonder what, if anything, he is leaving on the table by jumping ship now.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald