Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, is now on Time Magazine’s 2017 list of Top 100 Most Influential People as the only Swede on the list, Swedish public SVT Nyheter reports. He was chosen by British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who calls him a “tech pioneer”.¹

“Spotify was launched just as I was starting my own career, so you might even say that we’ve grown up together,” Sheeran writes of his history with the application. “… being able to have virtually the entire history of recorded music at my fingertips is phenomenal.”¹

Spotify was first founded in 2006.² When I first came to Sweden in 2009, Spotify was just starting to become popular among my Swedish friends and acquaintances. Now, Spotify is all over the world. In 2015, the corporation had control over more resources than the entire US compact-disc industry. By now, such a number is probably not very surprising. In 2013, 20% of Spotify’s total revenue came from Sweden itself, and over the past few years, the application has made particularly strong leaps in the United States and Canada.²

Many other, similar services have made attempts to compete with Spotify, but Spotify is still by far the most popular in the world, despite criticism regarding notoriously low compensation for musicians. Artists represented by smaller labels are particularly vulnerable, receiving only a fraction of the compensation of major artists.³ This has been a hot topic for discussion in the music industry, with many warning against music that isn’t “fair-trade”.³

Do you use the Spotify to listen to Swedish music, or do you prefer some other application? Do you think there should be some official certification for “fair-trade” music so that musicians are compensated more fairly? Let us know in the comments!

You can check out the Time 2017 Top 100 list of the world’s Most Influential People on their website.

Sources:
¹ Time Magazine
² Wikipedia (sv)
³ Svenska Dagbladet