Piracy was hollowing out the music industry when Daniel Ek co-founded Spotify in Sweden in 2006. His bet was unfashionable and correct: people were not stealing music because it was free, but because free was easier. Make legal listening more convenient than theft and they come back.

Spotify became the largest music-streaming platform in the world. It normalised paying a monthly fee for everything ever recorded, and it made the personalised playlist the way most people now find anything new.

His pitch to a wary industry was simple: convenience can beat piracy, if you make it good enough.

None of that was smooth. Years of tense negotiation with labels and artists over royalties followed, because streaming rebuilt the industry's economics from the ground up and not everyone came out ahead. He pushed hard into podcasting and audio besides.

He built a global technology champion from outside Silicon Valley, which makes him one of Europe's most prominent founders. Streaming stopped being an experiment somewhere along the way and became simply how the world listens.

Ek grew up in Rågsved, a suburb of Stockholm, and was building websites for local businesses as a teenager. He briefly attended the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, worked in senior roles at several Swedish tech firms, including a short spell as chief executive of µTorrent, and sold his online advertising company, Advertigo, to Tradedoubler. Martin Lorentzon, Tradedoubler's co-founder, became his Spotify co-founder.

Spotify launched in 2008 in parts of Europe and reached the United States in 2011. It listed in New York in 2018 through a direct listing, which let existing shareholders sell without the company raising new money through a traditional IPO. It later spent more than a billion dollars on podcasting, including a deal with Joe Rogan and the purchases of Gimlet and Anchor, and added audiobooks to its subscriptions in 2023.

Spotify reported its first full year of profit in 2024 after years of losses, helped by price rises and cost cuts. In September 2025 Ek said he would hand the chief executive role to Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström at the start of 2026 and become executive chairman. His investment firm, Prima Materia, led a large 2025 funding round in the European defence-technology company Helsing.