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Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham owe Daniel Ek a huge debt of gratitude at this time. Rock legends have all recently sold their song publishing rights for gigantic sums, sales that can in part be attributed to the surge in digital revenues that account for more than half of the global recorded music market. One man saw it all happen before everyone else: Mr. Ek, the co-founder of Spotify, 37, the world’s largest streaming service with 320 million+ users.
For those of us who regularly call almost any song we desire by tapping our phone screens, it’s easy to think of music streaming as an inevitable development. But for Mr. Ek, the streaming triumph was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. After suffering years of repression, Spotify has been at the forefront of a global revolution in the way music is consumed. It’s quite a turnaround for the Stockholm native, who has endured heaps of negative press, hostility from underpaid musicians everywhere and the looming threat of competing services from Apple, Jay-Z’s Tidal and many more. ‘other.
Co-written by two seasoned journalists who have followed the Swedish tech industry closely, “The Spotify Play” (translated into English by the authors themselves) delivers an outsider-to-kingmaker story that should be read by any entrepreneur. shy too scared. by the giants of Silicon Valley to confront them. Mr. Ek outlived his competition and defied his critics: his triumphs are recorded by 1.5 billion user-generated Spotify playlists.
A rabid teenage music fan, Mr. Ek’s exposure to Napster was a profound conversion experience. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker’s file-sharing service was the shell explosion that tore through commercial firewalls across the web. “Napster is probably the Internet service that changed my life more than anything,” Mr. Ek once told an interviewer. What if he could merge Napster’s peer-to-peer technology with commercial content? What if he could pull file sharing out of the shadows?
Even though Mr. Ek was rapidly evolving as a programmer in Stockholm’s high-tech marketplace, the notion of a legal response to Napster’s music streaming never left him. In 2006, Mr. Ek’s tiny startup Advertigo was acquired by Tradedoubler, a digital marketing company whose co-founder Martin Lorentzon was in love with Mr. Ek and his ideas. The savvy and flamboyant Mr. Lorentzon would become both a partner and a cheerleader. When he came to visit Mr. Ek in his upscale Stockholm neighborhood, Mr. Ek quoted “The Godfather”: “Put your hand in your pocket like you have a gun.”
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