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Title details for The Spotify Play by Sven Carlsson - Available

The Spotify Play

How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance

by Sven Carlsson
Jonas Leijonhufvud
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
Steve Jobs tried to stop this moment from ever happening. Google and Microsoft made bids to preempt it. The music industry blocked it time and again. Yet, on a summer's eve in 2011, the whiz kid CEO of a Swedish start-up celebrated his company's US launch.
In the midst of the Apple-Android tech war and a music label crusade against piracy and illegal downloading, Spotify redrew the battle lines, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, and got the hardline executives at Universal, Sony, and Warner to sign with its "free-mium" platform.
In The Spotify Play, Swedish investigative tech journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud, who covered the company from its inception, draw upon hundreds of interviews, previously untapped sources, and in-depth reporting on figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Pony Ma Huateng, and Jimmy Iovine. They have captured the riveting David vs. Goliath story of a disruptive innovator who played the industry giants in a quest to revolutionize the consumption of sound, building today's largest online source of audio, with more than 50 million songs, one million-plus podcasts, and over 300 million users.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 26, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781663711212
      • File size: 341825 KB
      • Duration: 11:52:08

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 30, 2020
      Journalists Carlsson and Leijonhufvud trace the victories and struggles of a startup turned behemoth in this fawning corporate biography of music streaming service Spotify. The authors touch on CEO Daniel Ek’s early tech ventures (among other things, he was a consultant at Stardoll, “a website full of virtual paper dolls that catered to young girls”) before he partnered with programmer Andreas Ehn and entrepreneur Martin Lorentzon to launch Spotify in 2008. Ek marketed Spotify as a solution to piracy, won the support of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and got an investment from Napster cofounder Sean Parker. The authors cover Spotify’s decade-long conflict with Apple, whose market dominance Spotify threatened as it took over the music streaming space. The authors display more enthusiasm toward Ek than readers are likely to have (they call frequent lies in his personal life “entrepreneurial hustle,” and spend pages writing about the “headaches” behind his multimillion-dollar homes), and let some of his surprising claims slide as quirks, as with an account of Ek insisting Steve Jobs was calling him to breathe over the phone and intimidate him. Nevertheless, fans of swashbuckling startup success stories will find this one hits the mark.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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