“Spotify has lost one of its standout executives. Petra Hansson left Spotify in 2017, after serving the company for 10 years at the streaming platform’s Stockholm headquarters.

Although Petra was still involved in the company, she had stepped down from the position of general counsel to serve as the lawyer overseeing Spotify’s licensing talks. The talks at the time were led by Ken Parks, who became the head of content. However, her role changed by 2013, the year the streaming platform recognized the need to launch a free version of its mobile app. Petra was the general counsel of Spotify for a significant period. She played a key role in negotiating with Edgar Bronfman Jr., the then-CEO of Warner Music Group, to make Warner’s catalog available on Spotify in Europe. In 2009, Petra joined Niklas and Ken Parks to continue negotiations to launch Spotify in the United States. When Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, envisioned his streaming service as a “free to all” platform, Petra made it clear to him that a paid version of the platform is quintessential with the help of her colleagues, which paved the way for the creation of Spotify’s ad-free premium version. “Sensitive to the needs of the music industry, she had a reputation for being a hard-ass, corporate-style lawyer who would clamp down on their impulsive ideas, like letting users import their own downloaded MP3 files into the Spotify client,” Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud wrote in ‘Spotify Untold,’ the source material of the show. Petra had a distinctive voice among the “tech geeks” who formulated Spotify. Around a year before Spotify’s launch, Petra joined the company and started to represent the streaming service in negotiations with music labels/companies with her colleague Niklas Ivarsson. In 2007, Petra Hansson was a lawyer working at Mannheimer Swartling, one of the internationally renowned Swedish law firms.

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