ABSTRACT
In 2008, the world got a new music streaming service named Spotify. It was developed in Stockholm, Sweden, and provided digital rights management–protected content from record labels and media companies. It may have started out as a local thing, but the freemium service quickly expanded. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million monthly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers. The author had the pleasure of meeting up with Andreas Ehn, who was Spotify’s first employee and CTO. Andreas was responsible for the product and platform architecture as well as hiring a world-class engineering team, of which many have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs on their own. Technology disrupted the industry. The massive-scale file sharing of Napster completely changed the dynamics in the business and completely revolutionized music online. Ultimately, it forced the labels to consider new business models, and this enabled the rise of streaming—which was led by Spotify.
