Revolutionary music streaming platform Spotify is a giant in the world of streaming. Arguments have sparked up over what is the ‘best’ service, but the numbers do not lie, and Spotify takes the cake. I was curious to find out why Spotify is as popular as it is, and I landed on Daniel Ek.
Daniel Ek is the millennial entrepreneur creator of Spotify, and launched Spotify in 2008. Before Spotify, there were very few subscription-based music platforms that were legal. Spotify also offers a very affordable subscription price, and even offers college students a further discounted price.
Ek saw this problem where there were easy ways to access music through companies like Napster or Deezer, but the ways people were using these services was illegal. Daniel Ek wanted to help artists take back their music, while he could also make money off of this.
Today, Spotify has its very popular algorithm that suggests new music for people to listen to based on their previous listening history, and also shows them statistics like who their favorite artists were from a certain year. Spotify today is valued at over $70 billion and is the first place on the podium of music streaming platforms, and that is coming from an Apple Music subscriber.
This is quite interesting how one of the biggest things they wanted to achieve was stopping the illegal distribution of music. I think Ek had a great idea and the algorithm always seems to know what to suggest. great work!
I never really knew a time without Spotify, so hearing how it came to be is very interesting. I didn’t know that most people were getting their music illegally prior to the development of Spotify and other streaming services. I really like how you included that piece of history because it provides a really good context of why the service was needed. Ek capitalized on this extremely well and has had immense success with the app. I wonder how complicated it was developing the idea and actually putting it into action. This is a great post, super interesting and well written, good job!
This is really interesting! I didn’t know that Spotify had been around since 2008. I think it’s cool that he noticed the issue people were having with legally downloading music and solved it pretty quickly. I like that his goal was not just to make money but to also help the consumer and help the artists have a bit more ownership over their own music. Spotify is very user-friendly and makes it very easy to find similar music to what you already like and it also recommends music that you might not have discovered on your own!
What Ek did for artist was awesome! There where tons of people taking music and the artist weren’t getting paid. The solution with Spotify was great! I personally use Apple music, but that’s just because it came with a prepaid plan. If I had the choice, I think Spotify is a great thing to support!
This story of how Ek created Spotify is a perfect example of having the mind of an entrepreneur. Ek simply identified a problem, thought up of a solution, and put it into action. Something that started so small and didn’t seem very probable for success eventually boomed into something found on almost every smart device in the world!