Freakonomics Radio

How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)

Daniel Ek, a 23-year-old Swede who grew up on pirated music, made the record labels an offer they couldn’t refuse: a legal platform to stream all the world’s music. Spotify reversed the labels’ fortunes, made Ek rich, and thrilled millions of music fans. But what has it done for all those musicians stuck in the long tail?

Dave Matthews performs for his biggest Spotify Premium fans at Columbia City Theatre on September 19, 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Photo by Mat Hayward/Getty Images for Spotify

Over the past year or two, Freakonomics Radio has produced a pair of special series on seemingly unrelated topics: “How to Be Creative” and “The Secret Life of a CEO.” This week, those two themes intersected in a conversation with Daniel Ek, the CEO and co-founder of Swedish music streaming service Spotify.

Spotify is — depending on your personal perspective — either an idealized digital jukebox or, as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once put it, “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” Yorke wasn’t the only musician to hate on Spotify, especially in its earlier years. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Taylor Swift famously kept their music off Spotify.