Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are currently indebted to Daniel Ek. The rock legends recently sold their song publishing rights all for gargantuan sums, sales that can be partly attributed to the surge in digital revenues that account for more than half of the global recorded music market. One man saw all this coming earlier: Mr. Ek, the 37-year-old co-founder of Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service with 320 million users and more.
For those of us who regularly call almost any number with a tap of our phone screens, it’s easy to think of streaming music as an inevitable development. But for Mr. Ek, the triumph of streaming was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. After years of adversity, Spotify has been at the forefront of a global revolution in the way music is consumed. It’s quite a turnaround for the Stockholm resident, who has endured tons of negative press, the enmity of underpaid musicians everywhere and the looming threat of competing services from Apple, Jay-Z’s Tidal, and many others.
Co-written by two experienced reporters who have followed the Swedish technology sector closely, “The Spotify Play” (translated into English by the authors themselves) delivers a story from an outsider to a king that should be read by any armed entrepreneur. by Silicon Valley’s giants to take on them. Mr. Ek has outlived his competitors and defied his critics: his triumphs are backed by 1.5 billion user-generated Spotify playlists.
As a teenager, Mr. Ek was an avid music fan, and the exposure to Napster was a profound conversion experience. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker’s file-sharing service was the shrapnel that ripped holes in the web’s commercial firewalls. “Napster is probably the internet service that has changed my life more than anything,” Mr. Ek once told an interviewer. What if he could combine Napster’s peer-to-peer technology with commercial content? What if he could pull file sharing out of the shadows?
Even as Mr. Ek quickly grew up as a programmer in Stockholm’s hot tech market, the idea of a legal response to Napster’s music streaming never left him. In 2006 the small startup Advertigo of Mr. Ek acquired by Tradedoubler, a digital marketing company whose co-founder Martin Lorentzon was in love with Mr. Ek and his ideas. The smart, flamboyant Mr. Lorentzon would become a partner as well as a cheerleader. When he came to visit Mr. Ek in his free-spirited neighborhood in Stockholm, Mr. Ek quoted “The Godfather” to him, “Put your hand in your pocket like you have a gun.”