It’s not often one sees you in Stockholm.
No, it doesn't exactly happen every day. And especially not to be here in Sweden and speak to a Nordic audience.
You spend a lot of time in the U.S. and are working there a lot right now. Do you have to be a bit more of a "preacher" in the U.S.? I’m thinking about Steve Jobs and Facebook, Zuckerberg, and all those people.
It doesn't come naturally to me. I started out as a programmer. I used to sit down in a basement or a dark room and code on the computer. For me, that might not be the most natural thing to do.
We'll hear a little more about that, but first I just have to go back to the beginning of Spotify. For those who don't know, Spotify is a technological innovation that allows you to legally share music online. And you were convinced of this as a 24-year old. Why did you think this was a brilliant idea when you were 24?
I thought that this was what people actually did. In '98 and '99, a music program called Napster came along, and it changed my life. All of a sudden, I discovered a bunch of artists through other people. Many of them were old classics, like Led Zeppelin or the Beatles. Whatever it may have been. So I thought there had to be a better way to do this, and it had to be possible to make it easier. That’s why we have problems with pirate copying—simply because the solutions that were available weren't good enough.
But when it comes to convincing the record labels and the record company executives, who viewed this as piracy that people downloaded music illegally. Right. What kind of world did you step into?
I remember the first time I met one of these executives and then I noticed in the background an iPad. And this was before the iPad was released. So this was one of the very first iPads, before anyone had even seen an iPad. That he had managed to get hold of. Yes, that he had managed to get hold of. So I asked him something like this: "What is that?" "It was just something I got." He hadn't even tried it. And a little while later, someone comes in with a piece of paper and asks... He said to himself: "What does this fax say?" "No, but that's your email address." Oh, I see. So he actually had an email printed out, and he says, "Fax it back to this person." So he's never even tried a computer.
So this was the industry you came into to challenge?
Yeah, that's when I realized it might not be enough to just work on this for a month or two to get this done. That it would take a little longer. And it took two years. Fortunately, there are also many people at the record companies who, of course, look to the future and use computers.
But it's maybe not surprising if we see this from the point of the former executives who may have been there from the very beginning of pop. I guess it’s not really that surprising that they... I mean, you came over and basically just said that what you really meant was that you wanted to have all their music and give it away for free. It’s a 24-year-old who comes out of a basement in Sweden. A computer nerd. Can you see it from their point of view? It's simply a robbery.
Yeah, they were a little skeptical at first, let's put it that way. But I think that what we managed to do anyway, and a lot of it was really just that we believed in our idea, and we kept working to improve it. We kept up this stubborn determination to come in every week and to keep scheduling meetings with them and just listen to their arguments and come up with some new arguments ourselves. Ultimately, I think a lot of it came down to the fact that they got to try out the product. We developed the product while negotiating with the record labels and then we gave it to them. And finally, they discovered that this is amazing. This has to exist. And that’s when we found a solution.
And today, it has something like 15 million songs.
We have 15 million songs, for sure.
That's amazing. It's a large online library, which means that someone at least should be able to make money from music again.
Every time someone plays a song, we pay the artist and the record labels in the end.
You know, this guy, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, he started out in a garage. You started in a basement. Can you describe a little bit what it was like in that basement?
Yeah, this is going to sound awful... But we can try. This was in my apartment in Rågsved, a suburb of Stockholm. I had all my computers and servers at home in my apartment. In that case, you could say that if you have that, it usually gets pretty hot. So it was 30 degrees inside. Usually, when I did the laundry, I could hang the clothes right away in the closet and they were dry because it was so hot.
So that's where you sat working in just your underwear?
Yeah, the thing is, my co-founder and I were literally working in our underwear. So it probably wasn't far from that. I suppose I should be glad that those record executives didn't see those days. Instead, they met us when we had dressed up a little bit, at least.
But you've been accepted into the prestigious school at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology. But you dropped out?
Yeah, exactly. About 8 weeks, or something like that.
I kind of felt like I thought KTH was absolutely fantastic because I met so many people who I later recruited to my company. That was great. One of my professors, whom I met in my first class, he now works at Spotify. I think KTH was great.
But eventually you became such a rich man, that you were able to rise from the basement and into a red Ferrari.
Yeah, that's right. There were a few steps in between.
Can you tell me a little bit about it? During those Ferrari days, what was your life like?
I grew up in front of a computer. It wasn't exactly the coolest thing a guy could do. It wasn't as if everyone was thinking, "Yeah, but that guy, he's sitting there in front of the computer all the time. He's the one I want." So it was a bit lonely for a while. And then I got a little older and started dating. That’s when I thought, if you have money, then the whole thing with the girls will work itself out. Then you can go to any club. It feels incredibly wrong today, knowing how things are. But what I noticed was that I didn't get any girls—that's how it ended. No, but what I noticed was that those weren't the kind of girls I was looking for.
