Meeting rooms are named after songs: Paranoid, Poker Face, Pretty Vacant. There are graffitied murals, whiteboards covered in Post-it notes, fridges stocked with complimentary soft drinks and a staircase lined with informal employee snapshots. Spotify's head office occupies the top four floors of a building in an upmarket district of Stockholm and has the typical accoutrements of a hip young tech company.

'And on top of that I get to hang out with artists I've admired since I was a kid. 'I get to learn from some of the most inspiring people in the world, whether it's the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses or famous brain surgeons, because I get invited to those things,' Ek says evenly. His next appointment after me is with dubstep star Skrillex. He fraternises with entrepreneurs, rock stars and other interesting, powerful folk. Radiohead's Thom Yorke recently said: 'I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing,' and called the industry's support for the company 'the last desperate fart of a dying corpse'.īut it has also made Ek many friends. Inevitably, it has made some impassioned enemies.

Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri recently valued the company at $5.2bn. Last month, on the fifth anniversary of its launch, it made more than 20million songs available to 24 million users in 32 territories.

Although many rival services are available, Spotify has become synonymous with streaming, the same way Google is with searching. This new product looked as if it might be the killer of the music industry rather than, as its quietly purposeful creator claimed, its saviour.Įk won that first battle for hearts and minds. Seven years ago, Ek began approaching record labels with a bold proposition: to make their valuable content available to rent rather than buy, and for free. 'He comes across as non-threatening in a business with a lot of big personalities,' says Gustav Söderström, Spotify's chief product officer. 'I think Daniel Ek is unbelievable but I don't think you can say he's a charming guy,' says Per Sundin, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Sweden.

Spotify ceo