Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham now owe Daniel Ek a huge debt of gratitude. All rock legends have recently sold their song editing rights for gigantic sums, sales that can be partially attributed to the increase in digital revenue that accounts for more than half of the global recorded music market. One man saw it all coming before anyone else: Mr. Ek, a 37-year-old co-founder of Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service with 320 million users.
For those of us who tend to call almost any song we want with a touch on our phone screens, it’s easy to think of streaming music as an inevitable development. But for Mr. Ek, the triumph of transmission was rather a self-fulfilling prophecy. After enduring years of setbacks, Spotify has been at the forefront of a global revolution in the way music is consumed. It’s all a decision change for Stockholm, which has endured heaps of negative press, the enmity of underpaid musicians everywhere and the imminent threat of competitive services from Apple, Jay-Z’s Tidal and many others.
Co-written by two veteran reporters who have closely tracked the Swedish tech sector, “The Spotify Play” (translated into English by the authors themselves) offers an outside-of-the-king narrative that should be read by all shy, overly frightened businessmen. by the Silicon Valley giants to go there face to face. Mr. Ek has outlived his competitors and challenged his critics: his triumphs are resonated by 1.5 billion user-generated Spotify playlists.
An aficionado of rabid teenage music, Mr. Ek’s exposure to Napster was a profound conversion experience. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker’s file-sharing service was the shrapnel blast that made holes in the web’s commercial firewalls. “Napster is probably the internet service that has changed my life more than anything else,” Mr Ek once told an interviewer. What if I could merge Napster’s peer-to-peer technology with commercial content? What if I could get file sharing out of the shadows?
Even as Mr. Ek advanced rapidly as a programmer in the Stockholm hot technology market, the notion of a legal response to Napster’s music transmission never left him. In 2006, Mr. Ek’s small start-up, 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 and extravagant Mr. Lorentzon would become a partner and animator. When he came to visit Mr. Ek in his docked Stockholm neighborhood, Mr. Ek quoted him as “The Godfather”: “Put your hand in your pocket as if you had a gun.”