Daniel Ek Quotes

Obviously, as the music business has suffered tremendously, with being able to illegally download everything, it's also become amazingly easy to find new bands, because everyone can put their stuff online. Even if you can't find a record label, you can find these awesome bands, all over the world.

The online musical universe has become Balkanized, with many sites focusing on minute niches. That works well for reaching very specific demographics, which is wonderful for advertising, but it flies in the face of the common wisdom that people's tastes have become more diverse as music of any description has become a mouse-click away.

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 think the cool thing about being alive in 2017 is that you can literally put out music as soon and as frequently as you want to because of streaming services.

People are experimenting with streaming, with subscription services, whether it's a Spotify or a Pandora or a Rdio.

The reality is, when I'm sitting in a hotel room at 3 in the morning, and I see something on the Internet that interests me in the form of a band I want to hear, I like the ability to just go online to iTunes and download it immediately.

There's a lot of people out there - like, a lot of people out there - that wouldn't know our music if it wasn't for Spotify.

I was always kind of against streaming, but I've been traveling so much, and I usually carry a huge hard drive of digital music with me, but I haven't had time to deal with it, so I've been doing streaming. And I had this incredible breakthrough of weightlessness where I've really been loving streaming music.

Through the Internet and technology, anyone can now seek out any artist, composer or undefined niche of music they find interesting. All on their own, without even having to stand up or go anywhere.

Don't get me wrong: there are aspects of buying music online that I love. Instantly being able to hear a song the moment it crosses your mind? Where's the downside? However, I do feel for those too young to remember the thrill of going record shopping.

With iTunes and Spotify and Pandora and this and that, you don't need to buy CDs any more.

YouTube is an amazing platform for young musicians - although it's harder to get noticed now that everyone is on it.

Someone asked me the other day what my favourite record shop was, and I said YouTube.

People just want to have access to all of the world's music.

With Spotify, people don't get it until they try it. Then they tell their friends.

Communion was born out of shared frustration in 2006. We felt that although the likes of MySpace and YouTube opened up the playing field for songwriters online, people's discovery of these new artists was only skin deep.

I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience - I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there's this musical eclecticism that happened.

File sharing is our radio; that's the way people hear our stuff.

I do love the music aspect of the Internet. The Internet made me.

The iPod completely changed the way people approach music.

I used to love going to shows and finding new bands, but the Internet takes the fun out of it. Like a band? You can buy and download every single song they have ever done within five minutes.

Spotify - I met those guys before they launched in America and was wildly excited about the idea. 'Wow, this is all the music in the world, for a flat fee.'

That's the beauty with music in the digital age: you're always one follow away from experiencing something new.

I come from the streaming world, so the changing trend of consuming music that way is positive for me.

We uploaded 'Ocean Eyes' to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.