A Chat With The King of Music: An Interview With Daniel Ek

I actually start off with a pretty much blank slate, and then ask myself what I want to accomplish during the day. And then I start there and say no to everything else. So sometimes my days, surprisingly, have almost nothing on them. And sometimes my days are very full. But it's not unusual that they are almost blank.

But we still think somehow that meeting virtually can’t be as good as meeting physically, but I actually believe that the virtual meeting might even supersede the physical meeting in the future and we will have even better experiences virtually than we are having physically, which is kind of insane to think.

Some of us may prefer just to hear the content, some of us want the visual interaction, some of us actually want to write it down, some of us want to teach it to another person in order to understand it. And so my view is we have to do a fundamental educational reform, because the reality is, going through a formal education system just once in our... See more

I think the value of education, obviously, is immensely important. But there are many ways to educate yourself, as you rightly pointed out, and I do think education needs a fundamental reform in order to keep up with where the world's going, both the wealth of knowledge that's now available online and the ability for us to realize that as individua... See more

But I personally think that many of the things that we talked about, like buttons, comments, etc, are things that are very much old social media norms. And I think the newer social platforms like TikTok and others are innovating past that in a new way. They still have the same type of functionality, but it doesn't work in the same way as many peopl... See more

And so I like to believe that with respect to overall creativity, in the next 100 years it will be even easier to express yourself than ever before. The barrier to be creative is just going to become lower so that more people can become creatives or musicians, but that’s not to say that the bar isn’t still high. Of course you have to learn the soft... See more

To start I like to describe where music consumption is now. It's quite obvious to avid music consumers that you can create a better playlist yourself than could an algorithm. If you really wanted to sit down to create that perfect playlist for your day, you'd probably be able to do a pretty good job by yourself doing it. Spotify will do an okay job... See more