Ken Parks, the head of Spotify's New York office, pictured here, appeared on All Things Considered alongside Evolver.fm's Eliot Van Buskirk on NPR's "All Things Considered" last night (photo courtesy of Spotify).

When I first met Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek in 2009, one of the first things he told me that the reason music plays so fast in that service after you hit the play button is that he used to be the in charge of the bit torrent file-sharing client uTorrent.

Ek told me he had incorporated a bit torrent-style P2P architecture into Spotify that enabled the software to grab bits of songs from other users so that they would play faster.

Fast-forward to November 2011, and Spotify’s P2P architecture is more important than it was back then, given the much larger scale of the service, which is growing by leaps and bounds now that Facebook users can see what their friends are listening to there (a phenomenon not exclusive to Spotify).

In the below segment, I spoke with Joel Rose of NPR’s “All Things Considered” about how Spotify works, and how its approximation of that old Napster feeling is reflected not only in its P2P architecture but also in its Facebook integration. Just wait until Spotify starts powering more apps, increasing its reach even more (although only the desktop version of Spotify distributes music via P2P).

The program aired last night nationwide, but you can stream it here (followed by some previous appearances):