Daniel Ek Quotes

I think 'pop' can be a bit of a dirty word. People are very cool in Australia. They don't like to admit that they like pop. There are people who listen to Triple J and cool stuff like that, but commercial radio is massive, and if you look at the sales of the pop songs every week, people love pop music.

My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio.

In England, rock music very rarely infiltrates the charts, but country music even less so.

There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.

I think that music is still art, even if it's commercialised.

The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it.

Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.

It really is, to see that this kind of music is still so popular.

It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music.

Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens.

There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.

I'm just out of touch with new music in general, and I only know about it if I'm hanging out with someone that knows about it, or I catch it on YouTube.

Music changes every three months. There's always new artists coming out. There's always new sounds. There is always a new hit coming out. You gotta stay relevant as much as you can and feed your fans as much as you can.

Popular music sucks so bad right now.

Downloadable music is the biggest musical phenomenon since the Beatles, and the music industry is slow to come to grips with that.

Revolt is my new - cable music network. It's distributed through Time Warner and Comcast. And to put it simply, it is the ESPN of music.

Before 'American Idol' and all this stuff, I was obsessed with music charts, and I used to go online to find out what was popular in other countries. I'd log on to the BBC website, and that's how I found out about artists like Natasha Bedingfield, Daniel Bedingfield and Take That.

Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.

I just don't get that new hot music. I don't know anything about all these groups like U2.

Popular music has always had its really horrendous stuff.

You have an entire generation of kids who grew up with the idea that music is something that you can download for free.

Napster is great so long as they put out tracks on there that have been officially released. I don't really mind people downloading my music; I also see it as a compliment. And if you are a real music lover, you want to have the original CD anyway 'cause then you feel more connected to the artist.

People's musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.

Distribution has really changed. You can make a record with a laptop in the morning and have it up on YouTube in the afternoon and be a star overnight. The talent on YouTube is incredible, and it can spread like wildfire. The downside is that it's very hard to convince the younger generation that they should pay for music.

I think downloading is both saving and killing the music industry at the same time.