The Spotify Play

"Two excellent Swedish journalists recount the historic rise of the company that changed modern music not just as a riveting business tale, but as a lesson in tech geopolitics. Spotify’s Daniel Ek shows why Silicon Valley does not always win.”―David Kirkpatrick, New York Times bestselling author of The Facebook Effect Steve Jobs tried to stop this moment from ever happening. Google and Microsoft made bids to preempt it. The music industry blocked it time and again. Yet, on a summer's eve in 2011, the whiz kid CEO of a Swedish start-up celebrated his company's US launch. In the midst of the Apple-Android tech war and a music label crusade against piracy and illegal downloading, Spotify redrew the battle lines, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, and got the hardline executives at Universal, Sony, and Warner to sign with its "free-mium" platform. In The Spotify Play, Swedish investigative tech journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud, who covered the company from its inception, draw upon hundreds of interviews, previously untapped sources, and in-depth reporting on figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Steve Jobs, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Pony Ma Huateng, and Jimmy Iovine. They have captured the riveting David vs. Goliath story of a disruptive innovator who played the industry giants in a quest to revolutionize the consumption of sound, building today's largest online source of audio, with more than 50 million songs, one million-plus podcasts, and over 300 million users. 斯凡．卡爾森（Sven Carlsson） 斯德哥爾摩的科技線記者，目前擔任瑞典廣播電台新聞的科技通訊記者，於哥倫比亞大學新聞學院取得碩士學位，曾任職於《每日工業報》（Dagens Industri）和《瑞典日報》（Svenska Dagbladet）。 約納斯．萊瓊霍夫德（Jonas Leijonhufvud） 自1998年成為商業記者，曾在網際網路即將泡沫化時，訪談亞馬遜創辦人傑夫‧貝佐斯（Jeff Bezos），以及當時剛創立Spotify不久的馬丁．羅倫特松（Martin Lorentzon）。他畢業於亞利桑那大學媒體藝術學系，目前是瑞典首屈一指的商業新聞報《每日工業報》科技線記者。 譯者簡介 李其融 自由譯者，喜愛唱片、點唱機與另收飲料費的狹小展演空間。看似採取感傷主義的音樂觀，但這其實只是見識淺薄所致。