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

Ek: “It used to be before that if you were a musician, you just put out music. But almost every successful creator now is omni- talented and omni-channel. That means that they are on YouTube putting up videos. They are on Instagram. They are perhaps putting together brands and putting it on Shopify, but they're also putting out music and merchandis... See more

“The reality is we’ve seen very few examples where this has worked. The exception is with the large platforms – Apple, Google, and to an extent, Facebook.”

The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more