Daniel Ek

“When I think about music in the future, I don't make a distinction between what's radio, what used to be the music library, and so on.”

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

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

“There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.”

“I don't think we see ourselves as the savior of the music industry.”

“This is a way for artists to communicate directly to their fans. If you think of an artist like Bruno Mars, he's using Spotify, creating playlists and listening to music through it.”

“At the end of the day, I want the music industry to be larger than what it is today.”

“We look at the sharing of music as really, really important for our business.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, 'I want to have my music with me.'”

“I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.”

“My ambition is we want artists to be able to afford to create the music they want to create, and if it takes them five years to sit down and make the album they want to make, they should be able to afford that. That's my goal.”

“If you write to me and it takes a day for me to write back, don't take it personally.”

“In general, people are comfortable sharing their music. There are two exceptions, though - Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.”

“I'm not an inventor. I just want to make things better.”

“A playlist can be very versatile, almost like a programming language.”

“I get to meet really interesting people.”

“In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.”