Daniel Ek Quotes

There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.

Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.

I think downloading is both saving and killing the music industry at the same time.

A protracted legislative fight will not move us closer to where the music industry wants to be - delivering music to fans through a variety of different, innovative Web sites.

There are millions of people who consume music illegally every month. Just getting them into a legal service will make the music industry way bigger than it's ever been before.

I'm into it, I'm into MP3's; I think there's no way you're ever going to be able to legislate people having to buy a record in order to listen to it. You have to look at it as a means of promotion, and if the music is good enough, promotion is a good thing.

I do not believe that people should steal music, but I think that fans need a better alternative, hence why I am such a fan of Apple, where you can simply buy a song for $0.99; it is very easy, it is a value-packed service... and this is a result of the shakeup... something has to happen in the music industry.

I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn't take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry - that gave us Spotify.

From the artist's standpoint, are you getting more from streaming than you used to, prior to the days of the Internet? No - and I don't know if those days are ever going to come back - but at least, technically speaking, it's the legal way to do it.

I think as far as the music industry is concerned, it's kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me.

Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars in 1999 to fifteen billion in 2013.

I imagine if Spotify becomes something that people are willing to pay for, then I'm sure iTunes will just create their own service, and they're actually fair to artists.

I don't think piracy is going to kill the music industry. But digital technology and the ability to download will change the packaging from CDs to a single-based business.

Downloadable music is the biggest musical phenomenon since the Beatles, and the music industry is slow to come to grips with that.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

I think another thing is that we don't really want exclusivity. We accept that it is in the artist's interest to be on sale in every place where they sell music.

Napster is great so long as they put out tracks on there that have been officially released. I don't really mind people downloading my music; I also see it as a compliment. And if you are a real music lover, you want to have the original CD anyway 'cause then you feel more connected to the artist.

I think the next big thing in music, and it's kind of because I come from the tech industry, is actually, I think it's the platform... Spotify is incredibly interesting. I think the platform is becoming the star.

Distribution has really changed. You can make a record with a laptop in the morning and have it up on YouTube in the afternoon and be a star overnight. The talent on YouTube is incredible, and it can spread like wildfire. The downside is that it's very hard to convince the younger generation that they should pay for music.

Don't believe bands who say it's all about the fans and they want to give their music away for free. The result is they will continue to live in their mother's basement.

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.

We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are downloading our music, they're listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

If you can use a search engine, you can find any piece of music that's been recorded for free. I'm not saying that's right, but it's a fact, and I'm surprised that more people don't accept or acknowledge that and try to adapt in some way.