October 2008 witnessed online music being taken to a whole new level with the launch of Spotify.  This free music app started with a simple vision of converting millions of pirates who illegally downloaded music to a potential customer base, providing them with a legal service for the same.  Little did the founders know this app would take the world by storm and become the go to music application for millions. Keep reading to know how this Swedish music company turned free music into a $ 26 billion dollar fortune.

Where it all began

Spotify is the brainchild of Swedish entrepreneur Daniel Ek.  Daniel Ek was born in Stockholm on the 21st of February 1983. Ek had a passion for technology since his childhood.  At the age of 14, he was already developing web pages for businesses and managed to earn around $150,00 a month. He invested this money into servers where he hosted web pages.  In the year 2006, Ek started his own online marketing firm, Advertigo. Despite all this, Ek was looking for something which would give him more than just money—satisfaction.

Back then, Sweden was home to millions of pirates who downloaded and shared music illegally.  When the government finally decided to shut that down, Daniel Ek saw a great opportunity to turn these pirates into potential customers and thus began the journey of Spotify.  

Ek sold his marketing firm to the Swedish company TradeDoubler and then established Spotify along with Martin Lorentzon, the cofounder of TradeDoubler.

Initial developments and struggles

Spotify’s development began in the year 2006 by Daniel Ek, Martin Lorentzon and a team of people at Spotify, in Sweden.  According to Daniel Ek, the Company’s name is a combination of the two words “spot” and “identify”.

In the beginning, the music industry showed very little interest in Spotify, as its idea to stream free music earned the industry far less revenue when compared to other paid services such as iTunes.  For this reason, it became extremely difficult for Ek and Lorentzon to get investors on board for the project. All these limitations, however, could not stop them.  The Spotify development team was finally able to launch the official application by 7th October 2008.

From an idea to a billion dollar entity

After the launch of the app, Spotify was unstoppable.  Within a short span, the app gained immense popularity, both among users and investors.  In 2009, Spotify won the backing of Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg took to his social media and wrote “Spotify is good.”  By 2010, the market value of Spotify increased to be $ 4 billion. In 2011, Spotify launched its services in the United States and allied with Facebook.  The user base of Spotify quickly grew to 5 million active users by the end of that year. In 2012, Spotify had 18 billion tracks and 20 million users. Over the years, top artists started collaborating with the streaming and Spotify started spreading its wings to the U.S.A., New Zealand, Australia and parts of Africa and Asia.  As of April 2019, Spotify provides access to over 40 million tracks and has over 200 million users, more than 100 million of whom pay for the service.

Future scope of Spotify

At present, Spotify has to rely on speakers made by Apple, Amazon and Sonos, but recent reports suggest that Spotify is working on its own voice assistant and smart speaker.  This smart speaker could prove to be a rival for Amazon’s Alexa.

Ten years ago, Ek made an assumption, people who go against the law to download music could as well pay a small fee to stream music in a legal way.  This assumption of his proved to be true and today, one among the most used apps in the world.

Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon proved to the world, with passion and hard work, no goal is too far.  Every entrepreneur can definitely learn something by looking at Spotify’s decade long journey.