Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are currently a huge thank you to Daniel I. The rock legends all recently sold their rights to release songs for huge sums, which can be attributed in part to the increase in digital revenue that accounts for more than half of the global recording market. One man saw it all coming before someone else: Mr. I, the 37-year-old co-founder of Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service with 320 million users and counting.
For those of us who regularly tap every song we want to call on our phone screens, it’s easy to see music streaming as an inevitable development. But for Mr. I, streaming’s triumph was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. After years of backlash, Spotify is at the forefront of a global revolution in the way music is consumed. This is quite a turning point for the Stockholm resident, who has endured heaps of negative press, the enmity of underpaid musicians everywhere, and the looming threat of competitive services from Apple, Jay-Z’s Tidal and many others.
Co-written by two veteran reporters who have been closely watching the Swedish technology sector, ‘The Spotify Play’ (translated into English by the authors themselves) tells a story of an outsider-to-kingmaker to be read by every armed entrepreneur who is too crazy. by Silicon Valley giants to go head-to-head with them. Mr. I surpassed its competitors and defied its critics: its triumph is marked by 1.5 billion user-generated Spotify playlists.
I was a rabid music lover as a teenager, and mr. I’s exposure to Napster was a profound conversion experience. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker’s file sharing service was the shrapnel explosion that tore holes in the web’s commercial firewalls. “Napster is probably the internet service that has changed my life more than anything else,” said Mr. I once told an interviewer. What if he could merge Napster’s peer-to-peer technology with commercial content? What if he could pull the share of files out of the shadows?
Even while Mr. I was quickly on my way as a programmer in the Stockholm hottech market, the idea of a legitimate answer to Napster’s music stream never left him. In 2006, Mr. I, a small business Advertigo, acquired by Tradedoubler, a digital marketing company whose co-founder Martin Lorentzon was delighted with Mr. Me and his ideas. The smart, flamboyant mr. Lorentzon would become both partner and cheerleader. When he came to visit Mr. I in his bustling Stockholm neighborhood, Mr. I quoted the “Godfather” to him: “Put your hand in your pocket as if you had a gun.”