374. How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)

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Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2019

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Daniel Ek, a 23-year-old Swede who grew up on pirated music, made the record labels an offer they couldn’t refuse: a legal platform to stream all the world’s music. Spotify reversed the labels’ fortunes, made Ek rich, and thrilled millions of music fans. But what has it done for all those musicians stuck in the long tail?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, it's Stephen Dovner.
0:04.3	Before we start today's episode, if you would like to see Frekenomics Radio live, we will
0:08.2	be visiting California in May.
0:10.2	Our San Francisco Day is sold out, but there are still tickets available in Los Angeles
0:13.9	on May 18th at the Ace Hotel Theater.
0:16.5	We'll also be in Philadelphia on June 6th and London on September 7th for tickets go
0:21.6	to Frekenomics.com slash live.
0:32.8	Over the past year or two, we've done a couple special series of episodes.
0:36.2	One was called How to Be Creative.
0:38.0	The other was the Secret Life of a CEO.
0:41.5	You wouldn't think those two themes would intersect all that often, but today they do,
0:45.9	in a rare conversation with this man.
0:49.7	My name is Daniel Eck and I'm the CEO and founder of Spotify.
0:54.4	How does Daniel Eck define Spotify's mission?
0:57.5	So the way I think about our mission is to inspire human creativity by enabling a million
1:03.2	artists to be able to live off of their art and a billion people to be able to enjoy
1:07.4	and be inspired by it.
1:09.0	Spotify, if you don't know, is a Swedish music streaming service with roughly 100 million
1:13.9	paid subscribers.
1:15.9	Another 100 million plus, listen free on an ad-supported model, but it's a subscriber
1:20.9	that drives 90% of the company's revenue.
1:23.8	Eck co-founded the company in 2006 at age 23.
	...

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