Behind The Future Of The Music Industry

Journalist Robert Safian sat down to interview the founder and CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek. There are many interesting aspects to this long conversation, but most importantly, it is rare that we get to read an interview with a tech company founder whose answers are not a combination of coaching-like sentences such as "get up" and "I just did it".

First of all, it's very interesting to see that Spotify places its focus on artists, and that the number of artists on the platform is key to their business model: in most cases tech companies are focused on the number of users who use or pay for their service.

Users are of course also important, but Spotify is not only focusing on only the most popular artists who would probably appeal to the greatest number of users. When they say they want to have one million users, I understand that they are actively seeking to enlarge their offer with more and more interesting bands – not necessarily only the most well-known artists – thus enriching the whole Spotify experience.

Another part of the interview that caught my eye is about piracy. We have to remember that Sweden (where Spotify was founded) is the home of the Pirate Party, and a country where even the Prime Minister has said that the personal use of downloaded content from the web (no matter from where) should not be prohibited nor be considered to be illegal.

Spotify’s take on it is that in the early days of the Internet, people were resorting to piracy more because there weren’t any services that could easily give them access to the content they were looking for. Nowadays the growing popularity of streaming companies shows that given the option, more and more people will choose to pay to opt in to services that satisfy their needs, rather than turn to piracy.

Overall, it’s a very interesting interview which offers many glimpses behind how Spotify sees its future, and the future of the music industry.