TLDR Tech / Marketing
Spotify's 265-millisecond obsession
Spotify won by making legal music feel as fast as piracy instead of competing on catalog or price. It treated speed as the product and built playback that started in about 265 milliseconds by combining local caching, prefetching, and peer-to-peer delivery. Only 8.8% of audio came from Spotify's own servers because cached files and other users handled most of the work. Find the biggest reason people choose an alternative product, then remove that friction even if it means building your product around customer expectations set by a competitor.
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