“We were convinced that our model would work, and that majors would make profits from letting us use their content,” Ek said. The negotiations with Universal took over a year, and Spotify has yet to acquire the rights from bands such as the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Getting permission from record labels has actually been Spotify’s single largest problem to date. “I did not even know that you needed licenses from the major !” “Because I was young and naive, I just thought ‘Hey, this can’t be too hard,’ but realized soon enough all the problems that arise from creating a service like Spotify,” Ek joked.

“We thought that if we managed to do this, we could get a big chunk of the 500 million people who consumed music illegally.”Įk thought that the problem was not that people did not want to pay for music, but rather that an efficient and convenient platform for doing so was unavailable at the time. “Our goal was to create servers that were faster than the pirate servers,” he said.

The fast Internet infrastructure in Sweden led Ek to found Spotify - together with Martin Lorentzon - there in 2004. “After the immense success of services like Napster and Kazaa around the millennium shift, it was clear to me that people wanted to consume music this way, on-demand and readily available,” Ek explained. He started his presentation, however, by explaining his rationale for founding Spotify. Since starting his first company designing and coding websites at age fourteen, Ek has moved on to found the advertising company Advertigo and has worked as chief technology officer of the online community Stardoll and chief executive officer of uTorrent, a BitTorrent client. “An entrepreneur is someone who has an itch for a problem and is annoyed enough to solve it,” Ek said. Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, discussed his entrepreneurial career and the future of the entertainment industry on Wednesday afternoon, addressing issues such as piracy (IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily) Invited as part of the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thoughts Leader Seminar, Ek spoke on his entrepreneurial career as well as the future of the entertainment industry.

“I simply see a bunch of problems to solve and needs to satisfy, issues that no one else wanted to do anything about. “I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” said Daniel Ek, cofounder and CEO of the music streaming service Spotify, to a packed NVIDIA Auditorium Wednesday afternoon.

Spotify co founder