Daniel Ek

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

I had two passions growing up - one was music, one was technology. I tried to play in a band for a while, but I was never talented enough to make it. And I started companies. One day came along and I decided to combine the two - and there was Spotify.

Music isn't like news, where it's what happened five minutes ago or even 10 seconds ago that matters. With music, a song from the 1960s could be as relevant to someone today as the latest Ke$ha song.

This is a way for artists to communicate directly to their fans. If you think of an artist like Bruno Mars, he's using Spotify, creating playlists and listening to music through it.

People just want to have access to all of the world's music.

At Spotify, we really want you to democratically win as a musician. We want you to win because your music is the best music.

I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.

At the end of the day, I want the music industry to be larger than what it is today.

In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.

In general, people are comfortable sharing their music. There are two exceptions, though - Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.

The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, 'I want to have my music with me.'

I was born in Sweden, and in Sweden we are known for the piracy services.

With Twitter and other social networking tools, you can get a lot of advice from great people. I learn more from Twitter than any survey or discussion with a big company.

I was the first real generation to have their teens on the Internet.

A playlist can be very versatile, almost like a programming language.

I don't think we see ourselves as the savior of the music industry.

I listen to jazz, pop, rock, R&B. It really doesn't matter to me.

What we do is wake up every morning and think about how we get more music out to people; how do we get better music? We breathe, eat, and sleep music.

I get to meet really interesting people.

If you write to me and it takes a day for me to write back, don't take it personally.

Spotify is a platform: it could be expanded to other types of content.

Piracy was kind of hard: It took a few minutes to download a song. It was kind of cumbersome. You had to worry about viruses. It's not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience.

With Spotify, people don't get it until they try it. Then they tell their friends.

Buying sports cars, going to expensive nightclubs, spraying people with champagne and things like that - what I learnt is that it wasn't for me, and, in fact, I feel pretty empty after doing that.

If you look at Adele, the reason she did so well was she created great music. It wasn't about a clever marketing trick.