If you look at Adele, the reason she did so well was she created great music. It wasn't about a clever marketing trick.
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.
With Twitter and other social networking tools, you can get a lot of advice from great people. I learn more from Twitter than any survey or discussion with a big company.
In general, people are comfortable sharing their music. There are two exceptions, though - Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.
Buying sports cars, going to expensive nightclubs, spraying people with champagne and things like that - what I learnt is that it wasn't for me, and, in fact, I feel pretty empty after doing that.
At Spotify, we really want you to democratically win as a musician. We want you to win because your music is the best music.
It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists.
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.
I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.
We really do believe that we can improve the world, one song at a time.
We kind of look at music as something very natural in people's lives. I mean, most of us can relate to music in some sort of shape and form, and if you think about it, most of us remember the first time we kissed someone, what kind of music was playing or the song that was playing on our friend's birthday.
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.
The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, 'I want to have my music with me.'
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.
I was born in Sweden, and in Sweden we are known for the piracy services.
A playlist can be very versatile, almost like a programming language.
With Spotify, people don't get it until they try it. Then they tell their friends.
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.
In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.
