As a legal counsel at Spotify, Mary Canter โ05 should be hard at work. Heaven knows sheโs got plenty to do with the new user privacy and data collection requirements that a certain popular operating system just enforced. But at the moment, sheโs staring lovingly into her laptop inside her Brooklyn apartment checking on her labradoodle puppy, Bonnie, that she adopted during the pandemic.
โI just put her into daycare, so Iโve been glued to this webcam,โ she says.
If anyone understands the lure of streaming content, itโs Canter. With 320 million active users in 92 countries, Spotify is the worldโs biggest music and podcast digital distribution platform. Most people assume she negotiates deals with artists, but Canter actually works on the product side of the ad-supported service, supporting product managers, engineers and business teams developing new features or experiences.
โIโm sort of like a cool mom where they want to build something, and I say, โGreat, letโs do it!โ and give them some ground rules,โ she says. โWhatโs really interesting for me as a lawyer is that the technology is always moving so much faster than the regulations that are applied to it.โ
Canter is the oldest of two girls who grew up in the D.C. suburb of Falls Church, Virginia. Her father is a lawyer and her mom is a retired management consultant. During a family vacation to Hilton Head when she was about 10, they made a day trip to Charleston, which included a visit to the College. She decided right then and there she was coming to CofC.
โI canโt imagine not having gone there,โ she says. โIt was such a meaningful place for me to be.โ
Sheโs still close friends with many of the same people she met in her freshman residence hall, most of whom live in New York City, too. And her experiences as a student are still with her today.
โIt sounds like a clichรฉ, but it was really the first time where I was allowed to have big ideas,โ says Canter, whose history degreeย included pursuing an independent study on genocide. โIt was a mind-blowing foray into some really difficult subject matter. It changed my perspective on a lot of things.โ
Perhaps thatโs why she pursued her passion โ dance โ rather than going straight to law school. Instead, she auditioned and was accepted into the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan.
โI wanted to be on Broadway,โ she says. โI worked at a coffee shop. It was my La Vie Bohรจme moment.โ
But after a failed audition for the Radio City Rockettes, she decided it was time to become a lawyer, one who supported the arts. In 2011, she graduated from Brooklyn Law School, which has a reputation for producing music-industry attorneys. After a stint as associate producer for modern dance company Pilobolus in New York and then at her dadโs firm in D.C., she got her first in-house legal job at Rosetta Stone before joining Spotify in 2019.
โIt is a really exciting place to be,โ she says. โSpotify puts a big emphasis on the culture. I know a lot of companies say that, but I really feel it. I never thought of work as a place where I would go to have a social life, but I do there. I canโt say enough good things about the team of lawyers I work with.โ
Sheโs looking forward to the day when she can be back with them in person at Spotifyโs very cool, multi-floor office in downtown Manhattan, where Bonnie will never be more than a click away.
Photos by Jorg Meyer
