The Spotify Play: How Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance. Este artículo no está disponible.The Spotify Play: How Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance

The Accidental Billionaires meets the music streaming business in The Spotify Play, a behind-the-scenes exposé of how Swedish college drop-out Daniel Ek and his financial partner Martin Lorentzon took on the giants of Silicon Valley and the music industry, betting everything on the power of an idea to build the world’s largest online source of song

On a San Francisco summer’s eve in 2011, after more than a year of delays, Daniel Ek—the whiz kid CEO of Spotify—celebrated the hard-earned US launch of his company. Only fifteen minutes away lay the modest brick house belonging to Steve Jobs, who had worked hard to stop this moment from ever happening.

The tech war between the Apple iPhone and Android had raged, and Jobs saw downloaded music—kept within his software—as the key weapon in his holy war against Google. But Spotify had redrawn the battle lines. With humble origins as a Swedish start-up, Ek’s platform had catapulted to the top of the music streaming world, using the threat of piracy and illegal downloading to get the notoriously hard-lined music labels to sign with him. But if Ek thought that the fight was won that summer’s night, he would soon learn otherwise.

Investigative tech journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud deliver an action-packed, revelatory true tale—based on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, and featuring the figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Sean Parker, Pony Ma Huateng, and Jimmy Iovine—about the creation of a company that has revolutionized how the world consumes sound.

Sven Carlsson is a tech journalist based in Stockholm. He is currently the technology correspondent for Swedish Radio News. He has a master's degree from Columbia Journalism School and previously worked at the daily newspapers Dagens Industri and Svenska Dagbladet.

Jonas Leijonhufvud has been a business journalist in Sweden since 1998. He interviewed Jeff Bezos when the tech bubble was about to burst, and founder Martin Lorentzon when Spotify had just launched. He has a BA in Media Arts from The University of Arizona and is currently a tech reporter at Dagens Industri, Sweden's leading business newspaper.

The Spotify Play was updated and translated from Swedish by the authors themselves.