Top 25 Daniel Ek Quotes

A playlist can be very versatile, almost like a programming language.

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they’re actually saying, not what they tell you.

Buying sports cars, going to expensive nightclubs, spraying people with champagne and things like that – what I learnt is that it wasn’t for me, and, in fact, I feel pretty empty after doing that.

In general, people are comfortable sharing their music. There are two exceptions, though – Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.

I don’t think we see ourselves as the savior of the music industry.

We kind of look at music as something very natural in people’s lives. I mean, most of us can relate to music in some sort of shape and form, and if you think about it, most of us remember the first time we kissed someone, what kind of music was playing or the song that was playing on our friend’s birthday.

What we do is wake up every morning and think about how we get more music out to people; how do we get better music? We breathe, eat, and sleep music.

For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn’t afford all the music. So back in ’98, ’99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.

I had always wanted to belong, and I had been thinking that this was going to get solved when I had money, and instead, I had no idea how I wanted to live my life. And no one teaches you what to do after you achieve financial independence. So I had to confront that.

With Twitter and other social networking tools, you can get a lot of advice from great people. I learn more from Twitter than any survey or discussion with a big company.

We are passionate about making it so that users enjoy the music that they want to enjoy but at the same time fairly compensates artists. That’s not the same as saving the music industry.

If you write to me and it takes a day for me to write back, don’t take it personally.

If you look at Adele, the reason she did so well was she created great music. It wasn’t about a clever marketing trick.

At the end of the day, I want the music industry to be larger than what it is today.

Music isn’t like news, where it’s what happened five minutes ago or even 10 seconds ago that matters. With music, a song from the 1960s could be as relevant to someone today as the latest Ke$ha song.

I get to meet really interesting people.

There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.

I’m not an inventor. I just want to make things better.

The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, ‘I want to have my music with me.’

We look at the sharing of music as really, really important for our business.

I realised 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.

It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists.

Piracy was kind of hard: It took a few minutes to download a song. It was kind of cumbersome. You had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience.

I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.

I was born in Sweden, and in Sweden we are known for the piracy services.