Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run
It’s true to say, without a hint of hyperbole, that 25 year old Daniel Ek’s Spotify has taken the global music industry by storm, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Even in markets it hasn’t launched in yet including the US, Spotify is generating a lot of attention and is now valued at €170 million. Music lovers have discovered ways to circumvent regional limitations on the software and are already using the service heralded by some as the future of the music industry. And that suits the music industry just fine, especially since they’ve invested in it. At a Glasshouse event at the Royal College of Physicians in London last night, an assembled throng of the tech business community listened to Ek’s thoughts.
“Despite making every mistake in the book in my previous companies,” says Daniel Ek, “with Spotify things seem to be working out. It’s true that we underestimated how long it would take the labels to come in, though: we started the company in 2006, but didn’t launch a product until 2008 because it took so long to get the labels on board.”
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