Daniel Ek

I worked insanely hard to get to even half of where we were today.

And then it's been a true sort of emotional rollercoaster.

And it is true what you say, but like for me, had you told me how hard this would have been, I would have never done it.

I'm happy I went through it, but I would have never done it.

Wow.

Weirdly enough, no.

That's the crazy part with it.

It was one of those where if you'd asked us externally, it felt like this massive event.

But if you were inside of Spotify at that moment, there was no one who...

thought that that was sort of the defining moment.

We certainly worried about, okay, well, is this the beginning of like more artists sort of pulling out, et cetera, for a few days.

And then, you know, I spoke to a lot of artists, but I think there were certainly a lot of skepticism about Spotify at the time.

But generally speaking, there had been enough things in Europe where people really saw like, no, actually this kind of works.

Maybe it doesn't work yet in the US.

Maybe it's better for her to do this thing.

But there was enough people that believed at that time that it was only a matter of time before the US would be majority streaming to the sort of,

way it's been portrayed oftentimes with Spotify in particular has been like this sort of dogmatic it has to be all in with me or not and actually that's not how I advise artists or creators

I always tell them like this kind of, and it's kind of unusual thing because everyone wants to build their own platform and so on.

But my firm view is that truly I believe in open as the model at its core.

And so my view has been like, there's some artists that at that time, I don't believe it's true anymore, but like the Adele's of the world that probably benefited from physical scarcity that probably didn't need to be on streaming platforms