Spotify Cops To Its Problems And Reveals The Massive Ambitions Of Its Founder
"Feels great to have the cat out of the bag. Transparency breeds trust," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted Wednesday, just after the Securities and Exchange Commission published his company's 256-page financial opus. The doorstopper document, called an F-1, is Spotify's manifesto ahead of going public, breaking down the 12-year-old streaming service's founders' hopes and dreams, its many problems and the minutiae of its accounting. It's the most complete picture of Spotify's internal landscape that we've yet seen, giving us a detailed glimpse into a company that has helped reshape our relationship to music in the digital world.
Ek's tweet was probably a genuine sigh of relief. Any company that either pioneers or dominates a novel way to leverage tech is, necessarily perhaps, a black box of trade-secret special sauces — especially when its service is so widely used, and so frequently maligned, as his. On the road to getting 159 million people a month on its platform, 71 million of whom pay for it, the company had to court and cozy up to the recording industry, one that is so secretive and competitive that even the Voyager probes' historical collection of humanity's sounds were held back from commercial release for 40 years because of the copyright conflicts it involved. At the center of all this are the artists, who, with the advent and and have been vocal about the miniscule payments they've received within this new system. The Berklee College of Music, one of the country's finest, has devoted to examining the issue.
