That was the moment when computers and Internet became our generation’s Rolling Stone, MTV. It was the moment when computers weren’t about academics. So many entrepreneurs my age, like Napster ‑‑ not necessarily Netscape, but Napster ‑‑ was that seminal moment. I think that was probably one of the things that made me really pay attention to the Internet in a different way. It reminds me of rioting footage, where you just see people like, “Oh, shit. The injunction was coming down, and we had 12 hours to get as much music off of a shitty connection as we possibly could. I vividly remember that week, I was super‑young in my career, and boyfriend and I both took off work. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, which was not a particular tech hotbed.
Sarah Lacy: You and I both had this visceral memory of first seeing Napster. The story– as told to me in an on stage interview in 2013– was even stranger than I could have imagined. Spotify hopes to join Pandora as the only two companies out of the digital music graveyard to become multi-billion dollar public companies that - at the end of the day– help the recording industry and musicians more than they hurt.Īnd Spotify - which sports a far larger private valuation than Pandora has on the public markets right now– hopes to have an easier time pleasing Wall Street.īut, while I’d heard the story about Ek and his partner putting in their own capital, I was never quite sure how he made the money to put into Spotify. He and his partner invested largely their own money until they showed traction, and likely would have never been funded otherwise.īut now, the RIAA salutes Spotify for building a product that makes people want to spend money on music again, as the new digital public enemy is YouTube. It took Founder Daniel Ek two years to get his first deals in Sweden, and another two years to launch in the US. It was also no small thing for Ek to start Spotify with the stance of not wanting to “Disrupt” music labels-he wanted to help them. It was no small thing for the Recording Industry to learn to love Spotify… or any Internet music company for that matter. Ironically, Spotify was backed by the guy who helped enable all that piracy to begin with: Napster’s Sean Parker. After almost two decades of decline, music industry revenues are finally starting to recover again and a lot of the credit goes to one guy: Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify.
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