Live podcast with Daniel Ek Founder & CEO Spotify: The future of audio, AI in music and motivation

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Great to see you all and Daniel. a warm welcome. Thank you, fireworks. That's what a way to start a conversation. No, we are at the time of the year when Spotify gives.

What's on your wrap?

Well, embarrassingly enough, what usually makes it on my wrap is my kids music taste. They steal my account still, and it's changed a lot. It was a lot of Dora the Explorer a while ago, and now my youngest is into Nicki Minaj. So a lot of kind of gangster rap. And for myself, it's a lot of African music, so West African vibes, a little bit of country music, too. So yeah, a good, healthy mix, I think.

Where is the music trend going? well? I think that there's kind of two macro trends in music that is interesting. One is that it's going hyper local. So you're seeing more variants of music taste now than ever before. To give you a great example, one of the most popular music genres in Brazil happens to be gospel music and funk music. Just to take two examples. These are genres that probably otherwise wouldn't have made it in a big way in Brazil, but those are one of the big ones.

And the other one is that almost everything is going global. So if you looked at the past five years, one of the biggest things was how reggaeton and latin music became a global phenomenon, with Bad bunny and many of the biggest artists these days are now Latin music. Where before that was, with a few exceptions, Julio Iglesias or Enrique Iglesias and Shakira, was kind of seen as an anomaly, and now some of the biggest artists in the world are Latin artists. And I think if you kind of fast-forward that trend, maybe five or ten years into the future. You're definitely gonna see Bollywood music make it into the global scene, and I think you're gonna see a lot of African music make it and become global phenomenon.

And it's such a vibrant music scene, especially now in Africa. It's super cool to see what's happening there, but the cool thing is you're also gonna see new genres form up. I don't know what will be popular here in Norway, but maybe there will be a country music artist that will make it big here in Norway, or another folk music that has the resurgence too. There are many of those kind of micro trends as well that works.

Is that good, is it bad for culture? Big question, big debate. I think it's both. I think some things are great, but obviously we are in this kind of fast consumption period.

But then things like you and I having deep conversations or podcasts that are two hours long or three hours long about microbiomes and all that stuff. Well, we're not going to have that. Well, you and I probably not, but someone on Spotify will be having that conversation. And what's so cool about it is that that also works, right? So you have this kind of enormous long-form trend and this kind of world where we're all living in short-form. Videos. 15 seconds, 200 characters on on X Twitter.

Those two worlds coexist at the moment in both.

And one of those was the suburb we decided to move to, or my family decided to move to. And it was great because you had, like, amazing housing. It was very cheap, it was affordable. And lots of young families with kids moved there. And so my mom grew up there, she stayed there, loved it and I was born. But by that time, it had changed from this kind of young families to going through the 60s. Lots of drugs, addictions, down to huge amounts of immigration. So my youth was. You had in Sweden a huge inflow of people from the former Yugoslavia countries, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, many of those countries.

So the demographics in a place changed a lot. But the more important things is, we went from a middle-class suburb to, like, a very poor and working class. And there were lots of drugs. And it's kind of the projects, basically, of Sweden. It became one of those zones that was talked about for, you know, so the nickname of Rågsvet became Drogsvet, because it was so.

And the founder of?

I got paid equity while I did that, and I don't know what equity was, but it was shares in companies. I thought it meant that people would pay me back if they can afford it. So that shows you my level of financial sophistication. But eventually, I made a bunch of money, and that amount of money was what I thought I might reach if I was lucky in my 40s or 50s. And so I did what I said I would do, which is that's the time when I will.

I had a lot of fun, I.

I'm pretty keen to explore this, but it may not be the place, it's definitely not the place. Yeah, but you know, I realized, to be honest, I lost a bit of myself in that process and that life that I thought I wanted. I never actually wanted. And working for me, doing the entrepreneurship things, the companies I was building, I didn't realize it was companies, I saw them as projects. But the main realization I had was that I would have done that even if no one paid me anything.

And so I realized there was a passion that was driving me more so, and that passion kind of centered around three very simple ideas. One of them is I like being around people that I can learn from. Another thing that I vowed to myself to not do was I wanted to have fun while doing what I'm doing. So many people are doing things they don't enjoy doing. I wanted to laugh, not take life too serious, but actually kind of just play jokes, practical jokes with each other.

Everything doesn't have to be super serious. And then the third thing is, I wanted to do something that I could have a small chance. Even if it's just a microscopic way of having a positive.

So he asked me one day, Well, what do you want to do? I want to do something with you? And I said, I pitched him, kind of an advertising company, another one, I'd already done one, and I pitched him a bunch of other things.

And he said, Well, why are you passionate about that? and I said, Well, I'm not, but I think it would be a great business. And I rationalized it really well. And he said, No, no, no, I want to hear what you're really passionate about.

Like, what would you do? And I said, Well, what I really would do was I would do music. Because I've got two passions in my life. I've got computers and I got music, and I would do a music company. And he said, So why shouldn't we do that?

And I said, Well, that's a terrible idea because that's a terrible business. The music industry is going like this, and he said, Well, why is it going like this? and I said, well.

I mean, well, back then there was two companies.

Maybe anyone heard of that? Some people nodding, but basically, it was the precursor of Spotify, but they were illegal. You could download any music in the world for free.

And it was great, and it was how I downloaded music before I had money, but it had a few downsides. One of them, obviously, is it didn't contribute anything back to the music industry. And the second thing is for consumers, it took a while to download the music.

And you could get virus in it. And it was like, sometimes it wasn't the music you actually thought you wanted to hear. So it had all these drawbacks, and so that was how most people listened to it. And in Sweden, we even had the Prime Minister of Sweden going out, saying that he thought it was okay to do that.

And so I thought, that was strange. You even had a Pirate party, political party, exactly, we had the Pirate Party, who made it all the way to the EU. Advocating for why corporate law needed to change so that everyone could take whatever they wanted for free. It was kind of an interesting time.

So did you basically save the music industry? Well, I would not characterize it as such, but I would say streaming saved the music industry and Spotify's the biggest player in streaming. Why isn't that the?

Trying to be diplomatic? So, in my mind, you are a hero, okay, but you're not presented that way everywhere, like in the Netflix series, which you probably have seen. I haven't actually okay.

But do you think some people, I mean, why are some people skeptical? Is it because you made so much money? Yeah, I.

I think you should see it, by the way, it's pretty good. Okay, yeah, I think it's a....

We don't do well with complex narratives in general as a society. And so what I mean by that is that the reality is almost nothing is black and white, almost everything is our shades of grey. And you have, in this case, Spotify, which, you know, if you take music specifically. It is undoubtedly so that the music industry is back at all-time high. And it's undoubtedly so that there are more artists now that can live off of music than ever before in history.

But it's a complex narrative because at the same time when people are saying they can't.

They aren't getting paid as much as they used to. It's actually true, and it's true for a number of different reasons. One could be that you used to be very popular, and for whatever reason, you aren't. It's a very tough conversation to have that, especially if you're me to say to someone, Hey, you're not very popular anymore.

You are not Taylor Swift, exactly. And then the other thing that we have to be cognizant of is the fact that. Even though there are more people that are being successful in music now, there are also more people trying. So the number of people that are failing are far greater than ever before, too, and that's because we've democratized music now.

So the number of people, the ease of access is far greater, but the ease of production. Because everyone now can make music on a laptop, they don't need expensive studios or expensive equipments to make. It is also true. And that wasn't done by us. So that means that there are more people now competing and on a percentage basis. There are actually fewer people succeeding on a percentage basis, on a relative basis, but on an absolute basis, there are more people succeeding.

So it's a complex narrative, right? And so you see these things, and in a way, it is truthful. Because when certain artists say, Well, I only made $15 and I had a million streams, it could be true. But that's because they are one part writer out of many other writers, and that's shared, and there's plenty other people who have part of that. It's also equally true that a million streams isn't that much, even if it sounds like a lot in the grand scheme. You just talked about blinding lights, having three billion, just to put a number of it, which is way bigger than I thought it was even.

So that just shows how scale has been redefined, both in the number of people participating, but also what it requires to be very successful today. And so that is a narrative. And then layer on top of that, that I've become incredibly wealthy for creating Spotify. Which may or may not be unfair, and that, I understand, is a very challenging topic for people to address. And I think it's a well-worthy debate. And I think it's fine to be criticizing me for all of that, too, because it is something that I'm conflicted about.

It is deeply problematic for me. Why are you conflicted about it? Well, I think it's the Nordic heritage in a way. I look at it as seeing the society here, and I still believe in the society as the greater part. And I see the same thing that everyone else does. The rich are getting richer and more people are struggling.

It is true collectively, and for me, I think we have a societal issue where if you contrast the two systems, I really think the key word here is equality. In the U.S. equality means equal opportunity, and in many parts of Europe, equality means equal outcome. And the reality, in my opinion, is neither system is delivering against its set objectives at the moment, right?

The U.S. isn't delivering equal opportunity, and I don't believe Europe is delivering equal outcome too. So the natural criticism of that then ends up becoming criticizing those that have the extreme tail-end events, which I think we as a society should debate. Absolutely, and it is kind of crazy, by the way, to be a billionaire by the age of 30, it wouldn't have happened 50 years ago.

Wealth gets created much faster than it has historically been before. And I don't know what the answer is to those things. It is something that I'm personally conflicted by, like, I think many other Nordic and Scandinavian people would be, absolutely.

I was thinking more about the brain, you know, how can we get, like, your brain spread out, how can we get your spirit, all these kind of things? So okay, so you want to start a company? What are the important things?

What's the secret?

You know, it's they're fascinating. The base around this, I don't know. I think his name is David Epstein. He wrote this book called Range. It's basically about genetics versus the environment, and one of the things he talks about is whether grit is something that is genetic or whether it is driven by environment.

Yeah, and he presents a quite compelling case that maybe it is genetic. I would have always thought it was more formed by the environment, so grit is what we in Norwegian would call tal, yeah.

And so I don't know, but even if that's the case, I like to believe that environment will shape us to quite a large extent. And so my view is, I do believe that when you think about it, I think that there's raw ingredients you need. In order to build companies, you need frameworks to enable you, so you know, hurdles and administration and complexity, all of these things will limit the number of companies that get created. You need the capital in order to do that, so you need someone. Whether it's used to be banks doing it, now it's VC funds and all sorts of angel investors and whole ecosystems doing it.

And then you, of course, you need talent, you need lots and lots of people with varying degrees of skills. How do you attract the talent? and how do you attract the talent? Exactly right?

Storytelling, those types of skills that all are needed in the founders that are there, but those are sort of the critical degrees. My point, however, is all of that exists in plentiful in Europe. And even storytellers, there are lots of more ways to become a great storytellers and learn through YouTube and podcasting and all these different ways. Now that just didn't used to.

Knowledge is plentiful on the internet. There's plenty of ways to do that, so I don't believe that there's any reason and best practices as startups go. There's all that. It all comes down to one thing, which is mindset, in my opinion.

What's wrong with European mindset? I think there's plenty of things. We don't have enough. People like us, people we can surround ourselves that have been there, done that, that can help us navigate these paths and on the mindset path. My view is, I also believe that we don't think it applies to us because we haven't seen enough other people succeed and do it. So, you know, when I think about creating companies, just start with a simple thing.

The first advice I give a complete novice one, it doesn't even have to be a technology one. I say, well, the fact that you just start the company, you're already in the top 1 because 99. The truth is, we'll talk about a business idea and the amount of time. People come up to me and said, Well, I had the same idea that you did.

And they might have, by the way, because that's the amazing things about ideas. Okay, so, rule number one get your finger out. Yeah, exactly, and just do it. Start the first step.

Because I like to believe that that is the number one hindrance to something. The amount of things and people talk about ideas like there should be any novel ideas. The amount of times we change the Spotify's idea from what it was, the core remained the same, but how we would go about it changed so.

All the spray icon media labs.

Bredbandsbolaget, like all of these dot-com things, most of them failed, by the way, came out of there. My first job was at Spray. As a 16 year old kid. I slept in bunk beds and I was coding all night, drinking jolt Cola. I thought it was like the best thing.

I was like, Holy shit, this is like what I want to do the rest of my life. Obviously, that company crashed and burned because we had no idea how to do business, but that was the dream, right? And that was what got my inspiration. And then, a few companies later, I joined a company called Stardoll.

It was all ex-spray people, and when we started Spotify, I hired those people who were ex-spray and ex-Stardoll people to come join Spotify. And so the reason why I tell you that arc is because success begets success, and even attempts, and experience begets more experience.

Do you think that was?

All the great producers, everyone else came from there, and that created more songwriting talent and so on, and perhaps that's what got me into music to begin with, too. A funny side note, as well, is when you look at all the music streaming services today. Apple Music is actually byproducts of Beats Music, which was originally a Swedish Norwegian company, so Apple Music has some Norwegian roots.

Tidal, that's now owned by block that was formerly known as Square. To make things even more complicated, was Aspiro, a Norwegian publicly traded company, too. So all of the world's global music streaming companies were basically Norway and Swedish. A lot of people don't know that, and so Norway actually has probably hundreds of millions of music consumers, too. That was originally built by Norwegian engineers.

Wow, and now half the?

Well, this is a question which my assistant insisted I ask, Yes, of course.

I mean, I often hear the phrase where you should go directly to the CEO, and I'm sure you get that too. A lot of people think that you're magically going to be able to enact some kind of decision. And it is actually true that there are certain types of organization where the CEO would probably always make the decision. A great example would be a Tesla.

Like, you have to go to Elon Musk if you want anything that to really happen of significance. But then I think it's more the Scandinavian leadership model, where you delegate decision-making, you allow your leaders to make it. So, in many ways, I'm probably the least powerful person in Spotify and I probably make the fewest amounts of decisions in Spotify. And my point with that is just to say that it's not always the sort of the one with the highest title or whatever that you should go to. It is trying to find the right person.

And quite often, even in order to get the right person, you need to influence a bunch of other people. And many people forget the people who are actually doing most of the work. And I find, like, one of those groups to be assistants, so almost all powerful people have assistants of some kind. And they are actually the ones who decide who this person is meeting or not meeting, and can really help and shape whatever happens in that person's day.

So it's just one of these stories where no one talks about it, but that's how it works. And it's kind of just a powerful trip. I would say, is to realize that there's so many people that make a great company work. And assistants, in particular, are hugely important and powerful people. But they rarely get that recognition. And they, in my case, made all the difference. Why I was, as a 23 year old kid in Sweden, was able to get in and have these meetings. I remember one time I had a CEO for one of the big record companies. And I had a standing meeting with him every Friday where he said no to me.

That was like literally all we did and about the third or fourth time we had this meeting. And he's like, How the fuck are you meeting with me every Friday? like, how do you get on my calendar? And what ended up happening was I had coffee with me every Friday. And I happened to know that there was a particular chocolate bar brand that this assistant liked. So I brought her that and I said, So, let's, and when I came out?

I said he wants to meet next week, too, every Friday. And she's like, sure. And penned it in right in there, right there. And eventually he agreed and we had a deal. So sometimes you have to be a little bit cheeky when you kind of make things happen. And will it into existence? But the assistants in this case was just.

Where is the Spotify product going from here? How is AI going to change it? how is?

Making it easier to pay, that's removing friction, moving from point A to point B in people's lives, so much is about solving very simple problem. So when you think about Spotify, the first thing to do is to think about, who are we serving? And we actually have two constituents that are equally important to us one is our consumer and the second one is our creators.

The people who have this really just amazing talents, god-given talents in storytelling or music, or authors, all of those different ones that we serve. So the easiest way to figure out what Spotify is going to do is to solve the problems for those constituents. And the best problems are the ones that are true for both of them at the same time. So if there's a huge consumer need that also happens to be a big creator need, it is obviously going to make it very, very high up on the Spotify list on the roadmap. So all you need to know, if you want to know what Spotify is going to do, is look for things that you know. Will be huge problems for consumers and huge problems for creators, and we will prioritize that.

There will be instances where we prioritize things that are only good for consumers and neutral to creators. But that would make it lower down on the priority list and vice versa, of course. So how am I going to?

If you really spent the time on researching and doing all that stuff, I think five years to ten years from now that will not be true. I think we will do a better job. Even if you spend a whole working day trying to figure out what you wanted to listen to, we will be able to create a playlist that is so much better than any of that. So that means, in plain English, to be. Right now, Spotify is your friend that knows music really well, and podcasts and all that other stuff.

And it knows you okay, but it doesn't understand you and what you might want at precisely this moment. Or novel things that you haven't shown appreciation for before, but might be if we introduced it in the right way. And I think we're going to become that trusted friend, where we're going to introduce you to things that you probably thought. No way in hell am I going to be interested in this and you're going to be, like, totally hooked to it.

What do you listen to?

Apart from in good company of.

I read a novel to get me to relax, I read something that I think will develop me professionally, that I kind of know. And I read something about something I know nothing about and have no way of knowing if I'm even interested in it. And so my podcast habits are quite similar, so I usually listen to, you know, something that kind of just interests me.

So in my case, it's sports, there's no. You try to buy Arsenal, right? That is correct. In a weak moment of passion, I try to do that.

It's kind of an expensive hobby, you know, that is an expensive hobby indeed, but sometimes you just got to go with your heart. Why did you want to buy Arsenal? It's been my favorite team since 1991..

And I, in a kind of passionate moment, felt like the club was going in the wrong way. And I said, I didn't realize it would be that picked up, by the way, but I kind of said, Look, if they want to sell it, I'd be happy to take it off their hands. And then all of a sudden, that became like a two-month long thing.

And people were like, Are you serious? And I had to, like, go through the process of actually like, Okay, well, what would it even cost? How would I put together the bid and so on? And eventually, I did all that work and was fully serious in doing it.

But what?

If you think about a sports analogy, you can have one team that shows up with 10,000 players on one team, and the other one has 10. So it can be a little bit of an unfair competition, an unfair game at times. But in sports, in football, which is my favorite sport, you have 11 players. Both sides have that right, and you can have players, and you can have whatever theoretical system you want. But the reality is those players will show up at that time. And they have different skills and weaknesses, and their skills and weaknesses will develop over time, too.

And so as a leader, one of the big things I truly believe is people have all these boxes and they try to fill the boxes. It's somewhat true, but you also have to play through strengths of your team. Like, if you have lots of people who are quite offensive, you need to back it up by being defensive yourself. If everyone's defensive, you have to be the one that's quite offense.

So I think it's about complementing the teams that you have, and sometimes that gets very intricate, too, in the specific sides. In our case, too, very specific to spotify. Much of what we do is such a legal environment. I was joking to one of the founders I met earlier today, who has a legal startup, and I said, Well. A funny side note is I actually run a law firm too, because I have more than 200 lawyers at Spotify that work too, which is a lot. Yeah, it's quite a lot. And so one of the problems, because I have so many of them, is the risk, and they are quite powerful, of course.

A lot of people when the lawyer tells you not to do something that's usually no like, completely stops the conversation. So how do you create an environment where you can take risks, with that many lawyers permitting, right? That's a very specific problem to Spotify, and we deal with IP rights and there are very, very, lots and lots of complexity that deals with that. So you need a head lawyer. That as a person on my team, that can see these nuances and can teach their team around when to take the business input and try to find solutions. Rather than just being the stop.

What keeps you going at Spotify? After all these years? Very few founders stay for that long.

And why some of these storytellers, whether they're a comedian, they're able to take these really complex things and really taboo things. If you and I would talk about it the way they do, we'd get instantly canceled. But they somehow are able to get us to laugh about these really sensitive things, and they're so important for our society and we get to serve them.

And we get to get people to feel more. Because ultimately, what Spotify is doing and what music does is. It takes every moment in your life and it gets you to feel more in that moment. And so for me, that is such a huge honor just to be able to be part of, and it's so fantastic. And then with my wealth, also. Then to be able to pass that on to other entrepreneurs and hopefully get them to think as big or bigger than I ever did.

And get them to tackle bigger problems for our society.

Companies that I am involved in trying to change, hopefully advancing industry, advancing infrastructure so that we move to a more sustainable future.

What about you?

When I screwed up something, even how I formulated something two minutes ago, I was like, I should have done a better job. And that is constantly how I think about things. I constantly see problems as much as I see opportunities in front of us, and I feel impatient to try to do that.

But I try to counter that by surrounding myself, as I said, with people where we can joke. And I love coming to work every day because I get to learn from these people. I get to send them weird memes, which they half of the time don't understand, and send me weird question marks back. But it's the way we roll with things and that brings me happiness.

And it brings me happiness to see the impact we're having. It brings me happiness to see when we have people inside of the company, when you see them developing one of our leaders that's now developed. I remember her quite a lot 12 years ago, she was an intern in our London office and I met her about three years ago.

Now, when they presented me as someone who might be capable to take our live music efforts. And I thought to myself, Really, we're going to take one of the interns and try to do that. I'm all for taking risks, but I'm not sure about that. But what I obviously had failed to realize is. A lot happened in the 12 years in the company. And she'd been doing quite a lot of amazing things inside of the company since then.

And not a day has gone by without me being super impressed by her and the amazing work she's doing. And I just use that as an example because seeing growth and positive impact just gives me a lot of satisfaction. But we live a very short period of time and my parting words to all of you would just be use the time wisely. We don't know when it's going to end.

I feel lucky to wake up each morning, but I also feel incredibly impatient to try to do the best that I can with my limited time here on earth. And that's the torture part of me. I'm both happy on the one side, but also feel like holy shit. Life is short and I want to make the most out of it so that I can leave it hopefully, in a better place than.