I'm not an inventor. I just want to make things better.
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.
Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.
At the end of the day, I want the music industry to be larger than what it is today.
The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, 'I want to have my music with me.'
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.
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.
We're focused on growing the pie so the artists can go back to making a meaningful amount of money.
I'm not saying you can't be successful in the music industry without Spotify. But when I look at the future of music, I don't think scarcity is the model anymore. We have to embrace ubiquity - that music is everywhere.
I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn't take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry - that gave us Spotify.
We are passionate about making it so that users enjoy the music that they want to enjoy but at the same time fairly compensates artists. That's not the same as saving the music industry.
I'm just interested in building a company that doesn't necessarily change lives but adapts people's behaviour.
People just want to have access to all of the world's music.
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.
For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn't afford all the music. So back in '98, '99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.
When I think about music in the future, I don't make a distinction between what's radio, what used to be the music library, and so on.
Piracy was kind of hard: It took a few minutes to download a song. It was kind of cumbersome. You had to worry about viruses. It's not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience.
In general, people are comfortable sharing their music. There are two exceptions, though - Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.
My ambition is we want artists to be able to afford to create the music they want to create, and if it takes them five years to sit down and make the album they want to make, they should be able to afford that. That's my goal.
It's hard to criticize someone who's hugely successful.
