Derek Ek, age 34, is currently the CEO of Spotify, one of the leading titans in the musical business. Named #1 in Billboard’s Power 100, the Swedish millennial has completely changed the world of music. Ek co-founded Spotify in 2006, launching it in 2008, and rapidly gaining major-label support for the vision of an industry-backed site making a vast catalogue of music available. It has also become a significant driver of music discovery, with the playlists it suggests to users. In 1999 Daniel Ek was a 16-year-old Swedish programmer, getting rich building websites, when he pondering a simple question: How do you get people to pay for music that can, if illegally, be downloaded free—and without charging them for each song?
Ek’s eventual solution: Spotify, a jukebox in the cloud that provides legal, on-demand access to millions of songs. Supported by paying subscribers; it now has more than 15 million users, four million of whom pay. With an estimated value of $4 billion, Spotify is one of the hottest Internet companies in the world.
Spotify isn’t the only service to let listeners stream music on demand. But it distinguishes itself from Internet radio services like Pandora and Slacker through the vastness of its music libraries and its deep integration into social media. Spotify lets users seamlessly share playlists and swap music on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And Spotify makes it easy for others to build apps that work with its platform in order to give users yet more ways to discover and share music. “The trick was to think through the social aspect of the service from the very beginning,” says Ek. “We didn’t want it to be an afterthought.
Now Ek is trying to find ways to make it as easy to find and play music as it is to find and play videos on YouTube. This year the company introduced a radio service for computers and mobile devices, launched its first iPad app, and made it possible to embed a Spotify play button into any website. The Huffington Post, the blogging site Tumblr, and Rolling Stone’s website are among the many that now offer music that way (Dyer, Technology review)
Ek is a great example of an entrepreneur who has discovered a problem from asking questions, finding a solution to his question, and distinguishes himself from the rest of the competition.
Spotify surely is a reputable and renown company in the music industry. This idea has revolutionized the way to listen to music! With the feature of premium, it has allowed its users to download playlists in order to refrain data usage and take their music with them wherever they go! The future for this organization is bright! Good post!
I love Spotify. I use it all the time because its interface is so easy to use. It even allowed me to free up storage on my phone since I could stream everything directly. Interesting post!
Spotify is a great company that has changed the way people listen to music. I know for myself I listened to 12000 minutes through just one year. People continue to get all the music they can possibly imagine for a nice now price. It also helps unknown artists get their names out by Spotify always trying to find something better for one to listen to. It’s truly a great product and idea for the people of our time.
Spotify is a revolutionary company. Daniel Ek was able to identify an industry that had become stagnant and was able to turn it upside down. As a user of Spotify, I admire Ek’s creativity and innovation.
I had often wondered about how Spotify’s success came to be. I use it all of the time, but never knew the amount of thinking that had to be done for the social aspect of the product, a key to the app’s success.
Spotify is a great product, and I use it all the time. I love that Spotify has a social aspect to it, to see what your friends are listening to. The other thing I love about spotify is that it is super easy to find music with all of the different ways that they suggest new songs for your specific tastes.