The Beatles and Pink Floyd famously kept their music off Spotify, as did some younger musicians:ĪBC News anchor : Superstar Taylor Swift abruptly pulling all her albums from the streaming service Spotify, just days after the release of her hot new album 1989. But don’t be fooled.ĮK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past.ĭepending on your personal perspective, Spotify is either an idealized digital jukebox or, as Radiohead ’s Thom Yorke once put it, “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” Yorke wasn’t the only musician to hate on Spotify, especially in its earlier years.

In person, Daniel Ek is mild-mannered and unexcitable he doesn’t sound like an anarchist. The Spotify story is a singular story about the sudden transformation of an old, hidebound industry it’s also a story about digital piracy, bandwidth, and of course about creativity oh, also: it’s about the future of podcasting. For a company that doesn’t really make anything - other than making the connection between a beloved product and people who want to consume that product. It went public in 2018 and its market cap is now around $25 billion. Ek co-founded the company in 2006, at age 23. But it’s the subscribers that drive 90 percent of the company’s revenue. Another 100-million-plus listen free on an ad-supported model. Spotify, if you don’t know, is a Swedish music-streaming service with roughly 100 million paid subscribers. How does Daniel Ek define Spotify’s mission?ĮK: So the way I think about our mission is to inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art and a billion people to be able to enjoy and be inspired by it. But today, they do - in a rare conversation with this man:ĭaniel EK : My name is Daniel Ek and I’m the C.E.O.

One was called “ How to Be Creative” the other was “ The Secret Life of a C.E.O.” You wouldn’t think those two themes would intersect all that often. Over the past year or two, we’ve done a couple special series of episodes.

Who owns spotify stitcher