Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham owe a huge debt of gratitude to Daniel Ek at the moment. Rock legends recently sold their song publishing rights for huge amounts, sales that can be partly attributed to the increase in digital revenue that accounts for more than half of the global recorded music market. One man saw all this happen before anyone else: 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 access almost any song they want with a touch of the phone’s screen, it’s easy to think of music streaming as an inevitable development. But for Mr. Ek, the triumph of streaming was yet another self-fulfilling prophecy. After years of resistance, Spotify is at the forefront of a global revolution in the way music is consumed. It’s a turnaround for the Stockholm native, who has endured loads of negative press, the enmity of underpaid musicians everywhere and the growing threat from competing services from Apple, Jay-Z’s Tidal and many others.
Co-written by two veteran reporters who closely followed the Swedish technology industry, “The Spotify Play” (translated into English by the authors themselves) offers an outsider-to-kingmaker narrative that should be read by every shy and frightened entrepreneur too much for the Silicon Valley giants to face them face to face. Ek has outlived its competitors and challenged its critics: its triumphs are accompanied by 1.5 billion user-generated Spotify playlists.
A fanatic music fan as a teenager, Ek’s exposure to Napster was a profound conversion experience. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker ‘s file sharing service was the explosion of shrapnel that opened holes in commercial web firewalls. “Napster is probably the Internet service that changed my life more than anything,” Ek once told an interviewer. What if he could mix Napster’s point-to-point technology with commercial content? What if he could draw file sharing from the shadows?
Even as Ek was rapidly rising as a programmer in Stockholm’s hot tech market, the notion of a legal response to Napster’s music streaming never left him. In 2006, the small startup Advertigo de Ek was acquired by Tradedoubler, a digital marketing company whose co-founder Martin Lorentzon was in love with Ek and his ideas. The smart and flamboyant Mr. Lorentzon would become a partner and cheerleader. When he came to visit Mr. Ek in his miserable neighborhood in Stockholm, Mr. Ek quoted “The Godfather” to him: “Put your hand in your pocket like you have a gun”.