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Daniel Ek Quotes

11 quotes from Daniel Ek — Co-founder and CEO of Spotify, the world's largest music streaming platform with 600M+ users..

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

Music

“Ask yourself: given everything you have to do, is there a way that we can make this better?”

Improvement

“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.”

Music

“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.”

— Daniel Ek, The Telegraph, 2010

“I'm probably the least powerful person in Spotify.”

— Daniel Ek, In Good Company podcast, 2024

“I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact, and I think truly sustained happiness comes from impact.”

— Daniel Ek, conversation with David Senra, 2025

“If we can create the feeling that people have all the world's music on their hard drives, we will have built something that's much better than piracy.”

— Daniel Ek, Stanford ETL lecture, 2012

“Some may also think that we're a bad business or at least a business with bad margins for the foreseeable future. So today we are going to say the quiet part out loud.”

— Daniel Ek, Spotify Investor Day, 2022

“Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact. In two words, we have to become relentlessly resourceful.”

— Daniel Ek, layoff memo, December 4, 2023

“The direct translation is 'a fiery soul,' and it means someone who's intensely passionate about something and is there in the good and the bad times and perseveres.”

— Daniel Ek, Tim Ferriss Show, 2020

“At the end of the day, it's about trust. If you say what you're going to do, and then keep on doing that, you will do pretty well.”

— Daniel Ek, Masters of [Scale](/mental-models/scale) with Reid Hoffman, 2018

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Daniel Ek

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Daniel Ek

Co-founder and CEO of Spotify, the world's largest music streaming platform with 600M+ users.