Daniel Ek Quotes

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.

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

Music is everywhere - you consume it every day, everywhere you go. The content creator should be compensated. It's only fair.

For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn't afford all the music. So back in '98, '99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.

Music is now becoming 'free,' and it's very difficult for new artists to start.

The income streams of musicians have all been upstreamed into the pockets of computer corporations. Sound recordings are little more than free crackerjacks inside every computer or cellphone that you buy.

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.

The big news already broke. The file-sharing and all that stuff, it's a done deal. And I think figuring out how to make that a fair exchange for the people that make music is still an issue.

I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.

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.

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.

I truly believe, as an institution, most major labels should just die.

There are musicians who want to make a living making music. There are listeners who want to listen to music. Complicating this relationship is a whole bunch of history: some of the music I want to listen to was made a while ago in a different economy. Some of the models of making a living making music are no longer valid but persist.

Music is more available than ever. It's up to people to figure out. Ultimately, it's up to the business to figure out what the business is, monetizing that.

With Spotify and all those streaming services, you don't get paid anything. You have to be, like, Madonna or something to actually make a real royalty from that.

Artists and the traditional record company model are at odds. The music business has notoriously taken from the artist. That shouldn't be the narrative.

Spotify wants to make consuming music simpler and at the same time pay the rights owners.

I pay for all my music.

There are those who say the music industry must adapt to a wired world. They point to the decades-long rise in CD prices, even as manufacturing costs came down, and to data that shows Napster may actually increase sales of CDs by music-hungry customers as evidence that the music industry is simply afraid of a new technology.

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.

The fact of the matter is that 40 years ago, unless you bought the record, you couldn't hear the music. It was such a narrow track in comparison to today.

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.