Daniel Ek Quotes

#1. Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is a rock star of the tech world, but he is not long on charisma.

John Seabrook

#2. It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists.

Daniel Ek

#3. When you look at a lot of the military histories, and even modern military history, everyone pretty much refers to each other by nicknames.

Pierce Brown

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

Daniel Ek

#5. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

Henry David Thoreau

#6. There are millions of people who consume music illegally every month. Just getting them into a legal service will make the music industry way bigger than it's ever been before.

Daniel Ek

#7. I was born in Sweden, and in Sweden we are known for the piracy services.

Daniel Ek

#8. I refuse to grow up. I won't become the adult guy.

Charlie Sheen

#9. But right now we have an advantage of being the number one in music.

Daniel Ek

#10. What I missed was what I missed every year when the season ended and abruptly the radio was quiet. I missed them.

Nicholas Dawidoff

#11. The silence gets us nowhere, nowhere way to fast

Staind

#12. 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.

Daniel Ek

#13. I had two passions growing up - one was music, one was technology. I tried to play in a band for a while, but I was never talented enough to make it. And I started companies. One day came along and I decided to combine the two - and there was Spotify.

Daniel Ek

#14. Dixie Carter was a goddess. The kind of wife and mother that every mother hopes their daughter will become and the kind of friend that is absolutely irreplaceable. She loved fiercely and was adored in return.

Annie Potts

#15. 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.

Daniel Ek

#16. Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.

Richard Russo

#17. I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.

Daniel Ek

#18. In general, people are comfortable sharing their music. There are two exceptions, though - Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.

Daniel Ek

#19. Misery loves company. There's a lot to that.

Harvey Pekar

#20. The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, 'I want to have my music with me.'

Daniel Ek

#21. My surfboard is a 7-foot-3-inch spoon made by Rip Curl, kind of between a longboard and a shortboard. Surfing brings me into the here and now. It's a dance with the present.

Mark Ruffalo

#22. We led with our conviction rather than rational, because rational said it was impossible.

Daniel Ek

#23. I wanted everything from and everything for him, because I wanted every piece of him.

Kiera Cass

#24. Beneath all of these addictions is this disease, this control disease which is the mark of our society.

Keith Miller

#25. With Twitter and other social networking tools, you can get a lot of advice from great people. I learn more from Twitter than any survey or discussion with a big company.

Daniel Ek

#26. That's the whole key to anything: Don't be afraid to fail. And Bernie Mac is not afraid to fail.

Bernie Mac

#27. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'

Naya Rivera

#28. No one wants to wait for tracks to buffer or spend hours searching through a Web site to find their favorite song.

Daniel Ek

#29. I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.

Daniel Ek

#30. In prison, you learn to count each day and each moment. You even count the bad 'meals' and the unbearable ones.

Abdullah Abu Snaineh

#31. With Spotify, people don't get it until they try it. Then they tell their friends.

Daniel Ek

#32. Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

Daniel Ek

#33. Spotify has paid more than two billion dollars to labels, publishers and collecting societies for distribution to songwriters and recording artists.

Daniel Ek

#34. I'm not an inventor. I just want to make things better.

Daniel Ek

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

Daniel Ek

#36. In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.

Daniel Ek

#37. At the end of the day, I want the music industry to be larger than what it is today.

Daniel Ek

#38. People just want to have access to all of the world's music.

Daniel Ek

#39. The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve.

Daniel Ek

#40. This is a way for artists to communicate directly to their fans. If you think of an artist like Bruno Mars, he's using Spotify, creating playlists and listening to music through it.

Daniel Ek