Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham owe Daniel Ek an enormous debt of gratitude right now. Rock legends have recently sold their rights to release songs for huge sums, sales that can be partly attributed to the rise in digital revenue, which accounts for more than half of the world’s recorded music market. One man saw all this coming before anyone else: Mr. Ek, the 37-year-old co-founder of Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, with 320 million users and counting.
For those of us who regularly play almost any song we want with a touch on our phone screens, it’s easy to think of music playback as an inevitable development. But for Mr. Ek, the streaming triumph was more of a fulfilling prophecy. After enduring years of pushing, Spotify has been at the forefront of a global revolution in the way music is consumed. It’s quite important for the Stockholm native, who has endured a lot of negative press, the enmity of underpaid musicians everywhere and the imminent threat of competing services from Apple, Jay-Z’s Tidal and many others.
Co-written by two veteran reporters who have been following the Swedish technology industry closely, “The Spotify Play” offers an “outsider-to-kingmaker” narrative that should be read by any shy entrepreneur. too scary. of the Silicon Valley giants to go head to head with them. Mr. Ek has outperformed his competitors and defied his critics: his triumphs are recorded by 1.5 billion user-generated Spotify playlists.
An insane music fan in his teens, Mr. Ek’s exposure to Napster was a profound conversion experience. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker’s file-sharing service was the shrapnel explosion that broke holes in commercial Internet firewalls. “Napster is probably the internet service that has changed my life more than anything else,” Mr Ek once told an interviewer. What if he could combine Napster’s pe-to-peer technology with commercial content? What if it could overshadow file sharing?
Even though Mr. Ek was rapidly moving as a programmer on the hot technology market in Stockholm, the notion of a legal response to Napster’s music transmission never left him. In 2006, Mr. Ek’s small 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 wise, flamboyant Mr. Lorentzon will become both a partner and a cheerleader. When he came to visit Mr. Ek in his fine neighborhood of Stockholm, Mr. Ek quoted the “Godfather” to him: “Put your hand in your pocket as if you had a gun.”