Neil Young has referred to him as Spotify’s “big problem”, but in Sweden he is known for being one of the country’s biggest young prodigies. At 38 years old, businessman and prolific entrepreneur Daniel Ek has become one of the most powerful and influential men in the music industry thanks to his greatest creation: the on-demand music platform that has transformed the sector and that in In recent days, it has grabbed headlines due to the controversy over the anti-vaccine podcast of comedian Joe Rogan and his sponsorship agreement with Barça.
Today his estate is valued at about $3 billion, according to Forbes, but that wasn’t always the case. The son of a mechanic and a childminder, Ek was born on February 21, 1983 in Ragsved, a “pretty tough” suburb of Stockholm, as he explained to the Financial Times. When he was 5 years old, his parents bought him a computer, a gift that would mark his life. Thus, he began to show his interest in technology businesses from an early age and when he was only 14 years old he began to design web pages and sell them to his clients. While his classmates were playing games and growing up away from big responsibilities, he saw an opportunity on the internet, in the midst of the dot-com bubble. He recruited a team of up to 25 high school classmates and set up a first business project with which he came to earn up to $50,000 a month, more than his parents combined.
After finishing high school, he began studying engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, but after eight weeks he dropped out when he saw that the first course would be dedicated to mathematical theory. Ek focused on developing his career as an entrepreneur and, after working on platforms like the digital marketplace Tradera, which eBay would end up buying, he founded the digital advertising start-up Advertigo. His creation was so innovative that, in 2006, the marketing company Tradedoubler paid him almost a million dollars for his project and earned another one from the sale of patents.
He was only 23 years old and already a millionaire. Then came the parties in mansions, the excesses and sports cars. Assuming so much success at such a young age is not something easy, and Ek took its toll. “Going to expensive nightclubs and spraying people with champagne was not for me, I felt empty,” he confessed to the Financial Times. “I was deeply unsure of who he was (…) I thought he would be a much cooler guy than he was,” he explained to Forbes.
Depressed, he sold some property and withdrew from the business frenzy to retire to a cabin in the woods near his parents. After creating three technology companies in a few years, his mind needed a break and among the trees he found a place to meditate and play guitar, bass, drums, piano and harmonica, his other passion. It was during this period of relaxation and artistic exploration that he began meeting with billionaire investor Martin Lorentzon and thinking about how to disrupt the stagnant music industry.
underpaid artists
With the advent of the digital age, music was at a crossroads. After opening the door to the sharing of songs between users, illegal music download platforms —such as Emule, Kazaa or Ares Galaxy— proliferated while the industry was desperate, unable to get people to pay for their product. Instead of wrinkling, in 2006 Ek and Lorentzon founded Spotify, a large digital music library that would go live in 2008. “The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and compensated the industry », he would later explain to the Telegraph.
Almost 13 years later, that idea is the largest music platform in the world. It has 406 million monthly users worldwide and 180 million paid subscriptions. Although it accounts for 31% of the streaming music market, the company has not yet been consistently profitable. Ek owns about 9% of the shares but has 37% voting control. That success has also been accompanied by controversy, such as the accusations that Spotify does not pay artists enough or the current protest against the podcast of comedian Joe Rogan, by far the most listened to on the platform, for having invited critics of the vaccinations and having made racist comments in the past.
A fan of Arsenal and the music of Daft Punk, Radiohead and the Beatles, Ek is quite a personality. In 2016 he married Sofia Levander, his lifelong partner, at a wedding attended by his friend Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, and starring Bruno Mars and Chris Rock. That same year he threatened to leave Sweden if measures were not taken, such as lowering taxes on the purchase of shares or reducing the cost of housing. Ek continues to live in Stockholm with his wife and his two children.
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