Spotify CEO Daniel Ek explains how the company plans to help artists (and itself) make money

“We can’t rest on our laurels. We believe the market we’re going after is audio. That adds up to 2-3 billion people around the world who want to consume some sort of audio content on a daily or weekly basis. If we’re going to win that market, we’d have to be at least a third of it. We have somewhere between 10-15x of where we are now of opportunity... See more

Spotify is rolling up the internet audio market, which their CEO, Daniel Ek, thinks will grow from $100 billion in revenue a year to somewhere near the video market, which is $1 trillion. People spend about the same amount of time consuming audio as video content. “Are our eyes,” he asks, “really worth 10 times more than our ears?”

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

It’s approaching problems the way every late-stage internet platform does, at least before it discovers its limits: by presuming total victory and control over the industry it’s been working to enclose. Spotify’s success as a basic streaming service eventually entitled it to a central role in how music is made and distributed. Why shouldn’t its suc... See more

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to go through a very similar journey where even the concept of what a podcast or audio actually is will become re-imagined.”

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