When he was young, Daniel Ek was a fan of the online music service Napster. But as a musician himself he understood why music piracy didn’t work as a business model. So Ek’s initial question was, Why hasn’t anyone made a version of Napster that works for both consumers and artists?
To do that you’d have to design an online music streaming service that rewarded the content producers. To that end, Ek worked directly with record companies to strike deals with their artists. But he also had to capture the fancy of consumers, and as he set out to do that he was guided by this question: What if we could build something that makes it feel like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive? To achieve that, Ek had to ensure that his idea, Spotify, would provide a massive offering of music, delivered at near-immediate download speeds and customized to listener preferences.
