Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur, and billionaire, who is the CEO and co-founder of the highly popular music playing platform Spotify. Ek was born and raised in Ragsved, a district in Stockholm, Sweden. At the age of 13, it was clear that Ek was already exceptionally gifted. Despite being so young, Ek was very proficient at coding and building websites, and he was obsessed with technology and all things digital. After graduating from high school, Ek enrolled at the KT Royal Institute of Technology, where he studied as an engineering major. However, Ek decided to drop out of college so he could spend all his time and energy on his IT career.
After dropping out of college Ek worked at a Nordic auction company called Tradera, until Tradera was bought by Ebay in 2006. Ek then started a company called Advertigo, which was an online advertising company. He later sold Advertigo, and became the CEO of μTorrent, which he ended up selling as well. Advertigo and μTorrent were so succesful that Ek became wealthy enough to retire after selling them, which he did. However, Ek quickly became bored by retirement and decided to create Spotify. Ek had been observing the music industry for years, and had noticed that illegal streaming/piracy websites always became more successful than legal, legitimate, online music platforms. He concluded that: “you can never legislate away from piracy. 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.” In 2006, Ek partnered with Martin Lorentzon to crate Spotify, and in October of 2008, Spotify was officially launched. Spotify was an incredible success and completely revolutionized the music industry. In 2017, Billboard called Ek the most influential person in the music industry. Spotify is currently the most popular music streaming platform in the world. I think that Ek’s realization about music piracy was very interesting and pivotal to his success. I use Spotify, and I love how convenient it is. Everything in the app works in a very intuitive and convenient way, and I can’t see myself ever not using Spotify, unless it gets downgraded or worsens in the future.
This is really interesting because I didn’t even know who created it. So, it’s good actually to know who made it. He was the most influential person in the music industry which is shit.