Daniel Ek Quotes

Social media and music in general have been changing so fast. You can go on Twitter and go from one artist to another. What I really like about it is the opportunity to communicate directly with your fans.

If your music is great, you will have fans, not because you have spent time chatting on social media.

I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.

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

The work I've done through my Common Culture Music series has enabled me not only to share my joy of music at scale but also promote the artists I love.

At Spotify, we really want you to democratically win as a musician. We want you to win because your music is the best music.

I'm not saying you can't be successful in the music industry without Spotify. But when I look at the future of music, I don't think scarcity is the model anymore. We have to embrace ubiquity - that music is everywhere.

When we first started in '04 or '05, that's when social media started to become a way to release music and connect with fans - and our fans were kind of at the forefront of that.

I try to keep track of what the kids are doing on Soundcloud, and all the new guys coming up.

Starbucks has changed the rules of engagement for the music industry.

The possibilities are endless now, with performing, getting your music online, getting your own website and getting your music out there. I think that's very cool and amazing.

Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.

I think I need to accept the fact that I am where I am today because fans have shared my music illegally and legally, but I wouldn't be here today without the Internet, so I can't speak out against it.

I started with a website, Jasonmraz.com, pre-YouTube. You could e-mail me directly, and I would send you a CD.

YouTube provides a unique opportunity for all musicians to market and promote their music and directly engage their fans.

I find a lot of up-and-coming musicians I enjoy, present them to my viewers - and hopefully inflate the growth of these artists by putting them in front an audience that wouldn't have been aware of them.

For the music business, social networking is brilliant. Just when you think it's doom and gloom and you have to spend millions of pounds on marketing and this and that, you have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It's amazing. And it's free. I love it. It's absolutely brilliant.

The Internet was a saving grace for promoting and exposing, and even creating. It's a parallel world to the music industry that already exists, and I'm glad to be a part of it.

I didn't expect major labels would embrace MySpace, and the original idea for music on the site was the unsigned bands, the independent bands.

I found Beam when he was 16 years old. He dropped his SoundCloud page onto my Facebook. 'I listened to it and was like, these tracks are actually dope.'

Whenever you put out music, you're just rolling the dice, and the nice thing with Spotify is they're willing to roll them with you.

SoundCloud was my first break I guess. I got a little bit of a following.That whole bedroom producer genre was kind of kicking itself into gear, and SoundCloud was becoming more of a hub for producers at the time.

I created the Soundcloud big bang; you already know what's going on.

Social media being used to discover new artists is great. There's not a barrier to enter the industry. People can just post music and share it. And if it's good enough, and people like it, it will grow.

I do love the social-media aspect of working records nowadays. You can do a video and put it up on social media, and people check you out who would never check you out before. I think it's much cooler that you can just get the product right to the fans.