![]() Prior to Spotify, Ek also worked as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of online fashion game, Stardoll, as well as launching his own digital advertising company, Advertigo, which he sold to TradeDoubler in March 2006 for SEK 10 million (around $1 million).Įk’s most controversial pre-Spotify job was at notorious piracy-enabling platform uTorrent, which he joined after selling Advertigo.Įk was briefly CEO of uTorrent, a role which came to an end when uTorrent was sold to BitTorrent in December 2006 – in the same year Ek and Lorentzon launched Spotify.Įk poached the founder of uTorrent, Ludvig ‘Ludde’ Strigeus, to lead the programming and development of Spotify. “Daniel Ek’s most controversial pre-Spotify job was at notorious piracy-enabling platform uTorrent, which he joined after selling Advertigo in 2006.” ![]() Ek went on to study engineering at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, but dropped out of his studies to focus on his career in tech.Īfter running a home business building websites in his teens, Ek worked at Swedish online auction business Tradera, which was founded in 1999 and sold to eBay in April 2006. Daniel Ek: Pre-Spotify careerĭaniel Ek was born in February 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden, growing up in the Rågsved district of the city. It’s a strategy that has seen Spotify outpace all of its music streaming rivals on a global basis.Īt the end of 2020, Ek’s company had 155 million Premium subscribers Midia Research suggests that, in Q1 2020, Spotify claimed a market share of global music streaming subscriptions of 32%, nearly double that of nearest rival Apple Music (18%). In May 2020, Ek said: “Eventually we will get to more of a point of maturity where we’ll focus more on profit over growth, but for the next few years it’s going to be predominantly growth for us.” Since the launch of Spotify, the exec’s mantra has been one of growth at (literally) all costs. “Eventually we will get to more of a point of maturity where we’ll focus more on profit over growth, but for the next few years it’s going to be predominantly growth for us.”ĭaniel Ek, Spotify (speaking in May 2020) In 2020, Spotify posted an annual €709 million ($810 million) pre-tax loss – equivalent to losing $2.2 million every day of the year. ![]() Since then, over the course of 14+ years of existence, Spotify hasn’t turned an annual profit at any stage in its history. Can Daniel Ek ever make Spotify a profitable company? Swedish billionaire Ek co-founded Spotify alongside Martin Lorentzon in 2006, launching the streaming platform as a fully-licensed service in October 2008 in Europe.
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