Free You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane Page A

into revenue: You explore your friends’ playlists, discover new music with apps from Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Last.fm, and build your own jukebox. Eventually you want to take it everywhere. That’s where Ek has you trapped. With Spotify you pay for portability—$10 a month buys you access to your collection on your mobile device.
    According to Mark Dennis, who ran Sony Music in Sweden, Spotify single-handedly stemmed a decade of nonstop revenue drop when it launched in 2008; by 2011 Sweden’s music industry saw its first growth since the Clinton Administration, with Spotify accounting for 50 percent of all sales (up from 25 percent the previous year). This in a country that was long a hotbed of piracy.
    Extrapolate that on a global scale, and the music industry felt like it had its magic bullet. Roughly one-quarter of Spotify’s users currently subscribe to the premium plan—that’s ten million people who now lend credence to Ek’s original pitch that he could rescue the record labels by waging a three-front battle with Apple, Amazon, and Google—and give their product away for free.
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    THE TWO FACETS OF Spotify—music and technology—were introduced to Daniel Ek at age five, when over the course of a few months he received a guitar (his mother’s parents had been an opera singer and a jazz pianist) and a Commodore 20 computer (his father left the family when Ek was a baby, but his stepfather worked in IT). He was a natural at both instruments. Within two years he was writing basic code as MTV played in the background of his family apartment in the rough neighborhood of Ragsved (known to the locals as “Drugsved”).
    At fourteen Ek latched onto the late-1990s dot-com mania, making commercial websites in his school’s computer lab. The going rate then for a commercial home page was $50,000, but Ek charged $5,000 and made it up in volume: He recruited his teenage friends, training the math whizzes in HTML and the artists in Photoshop. Soon he was netting $15,000 a month and buying every videogame out there (one favorite: a business game called Capitalism).
    True to the first generation to grow up online, he sought to master everything Internet. He bought some servers to see what made them tick, and wound up earning another $5,000 a month hosting Web pages. At sixteen, obsessed with Google’s speed, he applied to be an engineer there (“Google said, ‘Come back when you have a degree.’ ”) and then set out to build his own search company.
    That project failed, but led to a gig at a company called Jajja, where he worked on search engine optimization. The money was good, but the high schooler wasn’t really into it. He used the paychecks to buy more servers and tuners to chase his latest obsession: recording every program on TV at once (he had no clue TiVo was pulling off the same trick). The stacks of servers in his room got so hot that Ek would strip to his underwear as soon as he walked in.
    After high school Ek enrolled in Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology to study engineering. After eight weeks, realizing that the entire first year would focus solely on theoretical mathematics, he dropped out. Eventually a Stockholm-based ad network called Tradedoubler asked him to build a program to tell them about the sites they contracted with, and Ek built something so effective that the company paid him about $1 million for the rights to it in 2006; he made another $1 million selling related patents.
    Then things fell apart. A self-made millionaire at twenty-three, Ek found himself holed up alone in the woods twenty miles south of Stockholm enduring a harsh Swedish winter and a harsher bout of depression. Seeking the fast life, he had bought a three-bedroom apartment in central Stockholm, a cherry-red Ferrari Modena, and entrée to the city’s hottest clubs. But it was still hard to attract girls, and the