Daniel Ek showcased his entrepreneurial spirit when he started his first business at the age of 14. He went to college at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, but did not graduate. He formed the company Advertigo which is an advertising company that TradeDoubler acquired. Ek was also a part of Tradera and Evertigo. He then had a brief stunt as the CEO of utorrent until it was sold to BitTorrent in 2006. He then proceeded to set up Spotify that year. It took him and Marten Lorentzon 2 years to create Spotify, and they eventually launched it in 2008. He currently serves as the CEO of Spotify.
Spotify was the first legal service for music streaming. You do not have to purchase a song to hear it. Ek’s genius was making the service free, besides the cost of a few advertisements mixed in with one’s songs. If you don’t like advertisements you can purchase Spotify Premium for $9.99 a month. Spotify gained immediate traction, and took over Ek’s home country, Sweden, by storm. Currently Spotify has over 100 million active users, and 40 million subscribers. Spotify has brought Ek’s net worth to roughly 800 million dollars.
I’d really like to learn more about Ek’s journey in the process of founding Spotify. Specifically, I’m interested in the process of ideation and how his previous experiences contributed to the idea for Spotify. It seems that Ek’s experience with uTorrent would have helped Ek to identify the pain of music listeners. With uTorrent as a major part of online piracy, Ek would’ve likely identified the enormous amount of music piracy and the need for a legal, but still free solution. Spotify is an elegant and impressive product that has revolutionized music-listening and helped immensely to reduce music piracy.
It is very amazing to me that this idea was so successful and he was able to drop out of college to pursue it. He also made the app free which most likely made it more appealing, because you can listen to music for free as long as you watch the ads. I admire his creative and innovative skills that paved the way for this popular app.
Spotify is by far my favorite app. I use it every day and it’s the only app I am willing to pay for the premium version of. Great idea, layout, and execution. Near perfect app.