Quotes from Daniel Ek

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.

It's hard to criticize someone who's hugely successful.

I'm not saying you can't be successful in the music industry without Spotify. But when I look at the future of music, I don't think scarcity is the model anymore. We have to embrace ubiquity - that music is everywhere.

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

We're focused on growing the pie so the artists can go back to making a meaningful amount of money.

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.

There are millions of people who consume music illegally every month. Just getting them into a legal service will make the music industry way bigger than it's ever been before.

But right now we have an advantage of being the number one in music.

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

I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn't take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry - that gave us Spotify.

I had always wanted to belong, and I had been thinking that this was going to get solved when I had money, and instead, I had no idea how I wanted to live my life. And no one teaches you what to do after you achieve financial independence. So I had to confront that.

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

When I think about music in the future, I don't make a distinction between what's radio, what used to be the music library, and so on.

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.

For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn't afford all the music. So back in '98, '99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.

We kind of look at music as something very natural in people's lives. I mean, most of us can relate to music in some sort of shape and form, and if you think about it, most of us remember the first time we kissed someone, what kind of music was playing or the song that was playing on our friend's birthday.

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.

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.

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.

I get to meet really interesting people.

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

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

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