Daniel Ek (age 39) is a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO of music streaming platform Spotify. But how did he get to where he is now? When Daniel was 13, while other kids his age were still playing with toys, he began his business career. He made websites for customers, charging $100 for the service. Realizing that he could be making substantially more for his work, his 100-dollar price jumped to $200 and eventually reached $5,000 per website. (Apparently his parents started taking notice of his success when he started bringing home large TVs.) He employed some of his piers from school to help with the operation and by 18, Daniel had a team of 25 people and was bringing in about $50,000 per month. Ek studied at KTC Royal Institute for Technology but dropped out to pursue his IT career. Before Spotify was born, Daniel was involved in a many companies and startups such as Stardoll, Tradera, Advertigo, and for a brief period was CEO of μTorrent with Ludvig Strigeus, the founder. All Ek’s business ordeals made him wealthy; wealthy enough to retire. However, after a few months into retirement he became bored. As a young entrepreneur, he was hungry for a new project. The norm for the online music industry at the time was the piracy of songs off illegal websites like Napster and Kazaa. He noticed that there was an opportunity in the music industry. With developmental help from former business partner Strigeus, he began his work on Spotify. After it’s launch in 2008, Ek quickly became “the most powerful man in the music industry” according to Billboard. Incredibly, the streaming site has over 433 million monthly users today.
I absolutely love Spotify. I recommend it to everyone and argue for it against its biggest competitor Apple Music. It is funny how we as consumers can develop brand loyalties. I enjoyed reading a little about the story of how Spotify became such a giant.
It’s also nice that they made it so can use the app for free and still have access to every song on the platform.
Very cool. It’s impressive that he was able to take off as quickly as he did. A lot of the people in this time period who gambled on web development are now quite successful, so it makes sense that he would be too.