As we note in our feature on Spotify and its CEO and cofounder Daniel Ek, the streaming music service’s path to a leading position in the music industry was never certain and remains tenuous. How it got here–to 83 million paid subscribers and 180 million total monthly listeners–is a remarkable story.
2002: The idea for Spotify first came to Ek when Napster, the controversial file-sharing network, stopped working and Kazaa, a subsequent music-downloading service, became ascendant. “I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2010. “Laws can definitely help, but it doesn’t take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry. That gave us Spotify.”
July 2006: Having sold Advertigo, his adtech startup, and become a millionaire at 23, he had a quarter-life crisis, buying a red Ferrari and indulging in nightlife, but he hated it. ”We made money when we were incredibly young, and in the beginning we didn’t handle that well,’ he would tell the New York Times Magazine. “When you’re a computer geek, you think you want to be the guy with all the girls at the table,” he said. ”But I realized after a while that ain’t me.”
He follows his dream and founds Spotify with Martin Lorentzon, who acquired Advertigo. When Spotify announced that it had one million subscribers in 2011, Ek reminisced of the company’s early days “hatching ideas for a new music service in a tiny office-cum-apartment with a broken coffee machine” in a blog post. A couple of years later, the Guardian depicted Spotify’s early days in a three-room apartment above a coffee shop. [If they were working above a coffee shop, who cares if the office coffee machine was on the fritz? Or did they move to the place above the coffee shop because the coffee machine was busted? I don’t know, but coffee is great when you’re working on a big project.]
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