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THROUGHOUT 2010, DANIEL EK AND his team would shuttle between the head offices of the three biggest labels in Midtown Manhattan. They were all based just south of Central Park.

His goal was to sign with Universal and Sony, and then force the third-largest and most stubborn label, Warner, to fall in line. EMI, the smallest of the four, was basically a shoo-in, but the others were hard to convince.

Thomas Hesse, a worldly German with wavy, salt-and-pepper hair, oversaw Sony Music’s digital division. He and Daniel would have lunch at the Sony Club, a private dining room on the thirty-fifth floor of the Sony Building on Madison Avenue. Daniel would tell him about his years as a teenage entrepreneur in Rågsved and expound on how music could be shared in social networks like Facebook, as Hesse would recall.

For the major labels, sales were still plummeting. Digital distribution had grown to almost 30 percent of global revenue, but that wasn’t enough to compensate for the decline in physical sales. Hesse, who was also responsible for Sony’s sales and distribution in the US, watched as CD revenues fell every month. Soon, music sales in the US would be exactly half of what they were in the golden year of 1999.

“We can return the industry to growth,” Daniel would say during their encounters.

Hesse felt sympathetic toward the Swede. In Europe, Spotify’s model was clearly working. Beyond that, he was impressed that Ek had the backing of Sean Parker, whom Hesse would also meet with on occasion.

The Napster co-founder claimed that Spotify was needed to counterbalance Apple’s dominance over the music industry. Gradually, Hesse began to feel that it would be reasonable to let Spotify into the US.

But he needed to be certain. In the balance was Sony Music’s CD business and its long-standing, fruitful relationship with Apple. Hesse knew Steve Jobs personally. He had negotiated the iTunes deal with the Apple CEO in 2003, before the merger between Sony and BMG. Now, Steve Jobs was expressing skepticism about Spotify.

“I don’t understand why you would want to give your music away for free,” Jobs told Hesse, the German would recall.

The words weighed heavily on the label executive’s shoulders. After all, iTunes stood for the lion’s share of Sony’s digital sales in the US. And criticism of Spotify’s free tier was not without merit. At this point, the vast majority of the company’s users were still on the ad-funded side.

Daniel made a decent argument, showing how Spotify was converting free users to paying users, particularly in Sweden. But the equation was complicated, even to a former McKinsey management consultant like Hesse. It was far from a given that what worked over fast broadband connections in Sweden would be a success in the US. He wondered how Spotify’s free tier might impact Sony Music’s long-term revenue per customer, and its CD sales as a whole.

Usually, Hesse would let the numbers do the talking, but this one was tricky. Perhaps it would come down to the concessions Spotify were willing to make.

“What do you do about the iPod monopoly? That’s the interesting question,” Sean Parker said, riled up by his new favorite subject.

It was October 2010, and Daniel Ek’s most outspoken board member was taking part in a panel discussion in New Orleans, sporting a beige vest, striped tie, and gray silk scarf.

The movie The Social Network had just premiered, raising Sean’s public profile. He was famous for Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of him as the suave mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. But on stage, Sean was more interested in talking about Apple than about the movie. He stated that the iPod now had an 85 percent market share and that Apple’s closed ecosystem was shutting out every streaming provider in the US.

A few days after the debate, The Daily Beast senior correspondent Peter Lauria published a commentary describing a “war” between Sean Parker and Steve Jobs ahead of Spotify’s US launch.

“With Spotify, I want to finish what I started with Napster,” Sean is quoted saying in the article, which also states that the only man who can stop him is the CEO of Apple.

The piece would echo many of Sean’s own arguments. It praised iTunes for its “elegant design” but lambasted the service for selling music that could “only be played on PCs or devices manufactured by Apple.”

According to the article, the music industry had made a “devil’s bargain” with Steve Jobs, only to turn around and stifle alternative services by demanding upfront payments so large that their business models would be doomed. The list of startups to “flame out or fail to gain traction” was long, the article stated, listing Lala.com, Qtrax, Spiral Frog, Imeem, iLike, Project Playlist, Grooveshark, Rhapsody, and Napster as examples.

Lauria argued that Spotify could break the cycle, with seven million users in Europe—a figure that now included around half a million paying subscribers. But its launch in the United States had been blocked twice because of delays in signing deals with the major record labels, Lauria wrote, before delivering a final zinger: “A major cause of the delays has been Jobs himself, who is known for frequent calls to industry executives arguing that Spotify will cause them even more business pain.”

To the reader, it was unclear where exactly the information about Jobs’s behavior had come from.

Behind the scenes, the previous month had been a dramatic one for Spotify. In September 2010, Warner Music threatened to pull its entire catalogue if Spotify didn’t kill its free service, according to one source involved in the process.

The threat is said to have been delivered by Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., an imposing business magnate in his mid-fifties, who had become something of a nemesis for Spotify’s negotiating team. Bronfman made the statement in a conference room at Warner Music’s headquarters by Rockefeller Center, with Daniel Ek and his lead negotiator, Ken Parks, in attendance. Bronfman was backed up by his head of digital strategy, Michael Nash, along with several other lieutenants.

Visibly agitated, Bronfman repeated that he would not renew the European licenses if the free tier wasn’t scrapped, or at least severely limited. Daniel hid his emotions during the meeting but is said to have been taken aback by the display.

“He hated the idea of asking permission from anyone, for anything,” as one source would describe Daniel.

In an interview, Bronfman would deny ever asking Spotify to scrap its free tier, but he did admit to being one of the free service’s staunchest critics. His goal, he said, was to put a time limit on the free service instead of letting listeners use Spotify for free indefinitely.

“It’s unreasonable for us to continue to subsidize a free tier forever, and we’re not going to do it,” Edgar Bronfman Jr. recalled telling Daniel.

To the Spotify team, that demand was tantamount to killing its business model, reducing their product to yet another subscription service with a free trial period. The whole point of the free tier was that it had no time limit. That’s what made Spotify better than piracy.

It had only been two years since Spotify launched as a commercial service. While amounting to tens of millions of dollars a year, its payouts to the industry were still modest, especially compared to Apple’s. It wasn’t unthinkable that one of the major labels would suddenly object on a matter of principle. Yet the Spotify executives regrouped after the meeting and quickly regained their composure.

An outer time limit on the free service was unthinkable not just to Daniel, but to his whole negotiating team. They felt that such a fundamental revamp would be tantamount to killing the company. The question was if Bronfman really had a strong enough hand, or if he was bluffing.

Spotify’s two-year renewals in Europe had already been cleared with Sony and Universal. If Warner pulled out, they would risk looking like the only label unwilling to bet on a promising digital service whose payouts to the industry were growing. Besides, Warner’s owners were rumored to be negotiating a sale of the entire company, a process during which turbulence would be unwelcome. Sure, Bronfman hated Spotify’s free service with a passion—all the record labels did—but if he was truly ready to pull the plug, why did he seem so flustered about it? It seemed clear to the Spotify team that Warner’s chief executive was bluffing.

What followed was a month-long game of poker. Daniel met with Edgar Bronfman in London, while Ken Parks worked his magic in New York. Petra Hansson, Niklas Ivarsson, and Spotify’s new CFO, Peter Sterky, were also involved.

Finally, they worked out a deal that let Bronfman back down without losing face. The terms lowered Spotify’s costs of running the free tier, and let the company keep more of its revenues from paid subscribers. Warner’s catalogue would continue to be available on Spotify in Europe. The license was renewed for another two years.

“It felt like we’d won an existential battle,” as one person from Spotify would recall.

The terms were “not great, but at least they were sustainable,” as another source described it.

In one particular feat of financial engineering, the Spotify team managed to extend the amount of time they would have to make payments. The longer window of 45 days would prove a crucial resource for at least another decade. It meant that as long as Spotify’s revenues kept growing, the company would have more cash on hand than it needed to pay out at any given time. The negotiating team essentially had given their company extra cash flow to run their operations. As Spotify grew, so would the pile of available cash.

Daniel was relieved, having escaped yet another brush with death. But the new European licenses also came with concessions, said to have been made on the insistence of Universal Music. In certain markets, Spotify’s free users could now only listen for twenty hours per month, and only stream any given song a maximum of five times total. After six months of use, the time limit was lowered to ten hours per month.

While the new European deals were largely an improvement, the streaming caps would soon do serious damage to Spotify’s metrics. The company’s growth curve—its most important tool for attracting more capital—was in fact headed toward a downward slump.

Securing US licenses was a matter of survival for Daniel Ek. Without them, the new round of funding would fall apart, and he could kiss that one-billion-dollar valuation goodbye.

The problem with a phrase like “a billion” was that it stuck in people’s minds and tended to travel. At this point, details of Spotify’s soaring valuation had reached Doug Morris, several sources would claim.

The buzz around the Swedish startup reminded the Universal CEO and many of his label heads of other companies that had profited from their industry over the years. Skeptics would point to examples that stretched even further back than Google’s purchase of YouTube, or the wave of file-sharing services.

“It was a psychological problem dating all the way back to MTV, which made money off of videos that we had to beg them to play,” as one source described it.

Whether Spotify was headed for an exit by selling to a tech giant, like Google or Microsoft, or by securing its own funding, Universal had plenty of reasons to be skeptical. A deal with Spotify could cannibalize the label’s revenues from iTunes and upset their friend and collaborator Steve Jobs.

“All of that to help some little Swedish startup flip their company and get rich. Morris had no interest or incentive to do the deal,” as one source would explain it.

Universal Music was well known for having close ties to Apple—Steve Jobs had even floated the idea of buying the label outright on at least one occasion. Such a deal would likely have benefited many of its label heads. Jobs had also spent years cultivating powerful allies by means of Apple’s enormous marketing budget.

One source would recall that Jobs, as early as 2003, paid $150,000 to Jimmy Iovine for putting a new version of the iPod in the video for 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” At the time, the rapper was represented by Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records.

The following year, Iovine spearheaded U2’s long-standing partnership with Apple, starting with the cross-promotion of the album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb involving a special U2 edition of the iPod. The arrangement, in which Steve Jobs was personally involved, culminated ten years later, in a deal involving the album Songs of Innocence—worth a reported $100 million. Iovine’s ties to the Irish superband spanned decades. He had produced their albums Rattle and Hum and Under a Blood Red Sky in the 1980s, and later signed them to Interscope, although U2 also had contracts with other Universal labels over the years.

Apple presents the U2 Special Edition iPod in October of 2004.
From left: Jimmy Iovine, co-chair of Interscope Records, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, Bono and The Edge from U2. (ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo)

According to four sources, Jobs was now using his sway over Universal to try to block or delay Spotify’s arrival in the US. He appeared to do so by discrediting the Swedish company’s free service.

The Apple CEO was in frequent contact with Universal’s top executives in 2010, as the sources would recall. Two of them claimed that Jobs implied that Apple could withhold marketing money, or even shut the entire iTunes Store down.

“If the monopolist in the marketplace is subtly threatening you, you’re going to have to listen,” as one well-placed source would describe it.

One source claims that representatives from Apple also considered, in 2010, launching their own streaming service. The idea was to undercut Spotify’s price with a subscription that would cost six or seven dollars per month, instead of the going rate of $9.99. Another source would suggest Apple planned to launch a radio service, similar to Pandora, that would coexist with downloads in the iTunes Store.

The idea of revamping iTunes may partly have been the result of lobbying by the music industry. Edgar Bronfman Jr. would recall how he, as Warner Music’s CEO, flew to Silicon Valley to meet with Steve Jobs in the years after iTunes launched. He wanted the Apple CEO to incorporate a subscription service into iTunes, and he said that his counterpart at Universal, Doug Morris, had a similar agenda. Alas, Steve Jobs was not having it.

“He said people want to own their music. They don’t want to rent their music,” Edgar Bronfman Jr. would recall.

In 2010, the talks between Universal and Spotify were slowed down by constant chatter and gossip. One theory suggests that Steve Jobs wanted to buy time, at least until he had moved iTunes into the cloud. Others would claim that Spotify was but a blip on Steve Jobs’s radar and that he was simply looking after his own interests.

The subject matter would remain sensitive for years to come. The legal aspects are thorny. If a dominant distributor like Apple would have tried to counteract a competitor by colluding with one or several major labels, it could amount to a violation of federal antitrust laws. A similar situation was playing out with the iBooks Store. Apple would later be found to have conspired with five book publishers in 2009 and 2010, in an attempt to challenge Amazon’s dominant position in the e-book market. That case would go all the way to the Supreme Court, where Apple was smacked with a $450 million price-fixing fine as part of an antitrust settlement. (Apple would deny that it had conspired to fix prices.)

The topic would also remain sensitive because of Steve Jobs’s failing health. In January 2011, the Apple co-founder went on sick leave without stepping down as CEO.

Beyond the intrigue, Jobs’s worldview was aligned with Universal’s American executives. Jimmy Iovine would, for example, openly voice his opposition to any streaming service with an unlimited free tier, as a source would recall. The freewheeling founder of Interscope and Beats Electronics had, at least in his own mind, been fighting piracy through innovation for more than a decade.

As Iovine would recall in interviews, he and the Universal CEO, Doug Morris, had created a talent show with digital ambitions on late-night TV as early as the year 2000. It was called Farmclub, and it aired on the USA Network. The venture was backed with $25 million from Edgar Bronfman Jr., then CEO of Seagram, which owned Universal Music and 43 percent of the USA Network.

Posing for pictures on the Universal Studios soundstage, the two formed a comical duo—the thin, boisterous Jimmy Iovine, with his baseball cap and flamboyant streetwear, next to the heavyset Doug Morris, in his pinstripe suit and boardroom tie. The show—which featured former Miss USA Ali Landry and MTV personality Matt Pinfield as hosts, with Eminem in the green room—set out to challenge Napster by letting viewers vote for unsigned bands on a website called Farmclub.com. Later, they could watch the most popular acts perform on air in the hope of getting signed. It was a haphazard production, but Iovine, Morris, and the others ultimately wanted to turn it into a digital music service, and maybe even IPO the whole thing. But the slowly bursting tech bubble put an end to the duo’s ambitions. The venture left an indelible impression on Iovine, however, convincing him that he could innovate in the digital age.

In the years to come, Iovine would hitch his star to the promise of combining digital music with physical hardware. When Apple started building the iTunes Music Store in 2002, Steve Jobs’s main motivation was to bolster the sale of iPods and Macs. Iovine was quick to seize the opportunity and make money by using his artists to help with the marketing. In 2006, he founded his own hardware company, Beats Electronics, once again using artists to market the headphones. By the time Spotify came knocking in 2010, Iovine felt that a distribution platform with free music as its selling point, had little to offer the industry—an opinion he wasn’t afraid to share.

There were plenty of Spotify critics at the very top of the Universal camp. From Daniel Ek’s point of view, the tide needed to turn. Toward the end of 2010, it seemed as though it might.

Universal’s leadership was about to change. The French owner, Vivendi, had recently tapped Lucian Grainge, the fifty-year-old chairman of Universal Music Group International, to leave London and take the reins from Doug Morris in the US. The operations were set to become more globally integrated.

The two appeared to be embroiled in what several sources would describe as a personal feud. The long-serving Morris, now into his seventies, is said to have wanted Grainge to move to New York, where he was based, so they could run things together for a while. But Grainge would instead assert his power by choosing to move to Universal’s Santa Monica offices in Los Angeles.

Along for the ride was Universal’s head of digital, Rob Wells, who had first met Daniel Ek in London a few years prior. Wells, who was now known as a vocal Spotify proponent, was promoted and given the title President of Global Digital Business in October 2010. His main task would be to create a unified digital strategy within Universal. That meant bringing Spotify to the US, while keeping Apple happy at the same time.

In a written statement, now-co-CEO Lucian Grainge hailed Rob Wells, saying that no one was better equipped for the new position.

As Lucian Grainge was taking over the reins in the fall of 2010, it looked as though Spotify had finally reached a landmark US deal with Universal. By the end of the year a contract was drawn up and ready. But, suddenly, Universal refused to sign. The label simply didn’t return their signature page of the contract, as one source would recall.

“They took the deal and sat on it,” as another source familiar with Spotify’s end of the process would express it.

The Spotify headquarters was now rife with rumors and speculation. Its various teams had been looking forward to launching in the United States by the end of 2010, but now they were being told that everything was on hold. They were not told why. Some began to whisper that Warner was the problem, while others blamed Universal.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in the early days of the new year, Universal executive Rob Wells told a Spotify employee that a deal would soon be done, according to two sources. One of them would recall him saying that Universal couldn’t be first. Spotify needed to sign with another label first, and they would follow.

Spotify’s first major breakthrough in the US came later the same month, in January 2011, when they signed a licensing deal with Sony Music. The terms looked much like the deal they had recently agreed to in Europe. But it also came at a hefty price for Spotify’s shareholders.

Secret internal documents, which would not emerge until the publication of the Swedish edition of this book, reveal that Sony had negotiated an option—triggered four years down the line—to purchase what would amount to 2.5 percent of Spotify at a heavy discount. The label’s payoff came in the spring of 2015, when Sony paid just under $8 million for shares that, a few months later, would become worth twenty-five times more. Largely as a result of this deal, Sony would become the label with the largest Spotify holdings by the time the company went public in 2018.

The actual license agreement with Sony Music was forty-two pages long and would eventually leak to The Verge. The details show how complex Spotify’s deals can be, and why some would argue that the system favored labels over artists. For readers with a special interest in this kind of fine print, here are some highlights and analysis:

The complexity of the deal shows why Daniel Ek would always prefer to talk about Spotify’s total payouts to the music industry, rather than get into the details.

Although a deal was reached with Sony Music, negotiations remained at a standstill with Universal. It seemed as if Lucian Grainge, having installed himself in Santa Monica, was getting cold feet.

“Lucian didn’t want to become global head of Universal and piss off his largest digital retailer, Apple, as his first official act,” as a source would describe it.

The chatter at Universal’s headquarters was still that the Swedes were hoping to launch in the United States and then sell their company to the highest bidder—and Universal Music wanted its fair share.

“If they flipped it quickly, it would not be a fair exchange,” as a different source would recall.

For this reason, Universal had demanded that a secret side deal be drafted. It stipulated that Martin Lorentzon, Daniel Ek, and several other major Spotify shareholders would pay Universal tens of millions of dollars if they sold their company, or went public, within a certain time frame. Two sources would recall that the agreement was in place for two years, and could be extended after that.

The deal would remain extra sensitive since it wasn’t struck between the two companies, but rather between Universal and most of Spotify’s shareholders. This may have been a way of sidestepping the “Most Favored Nation” clause that assured that no one label could get a better deal than the others.

One source would claim that Spotify and Lucian Grainge struck this deal as early as the fall of 2010. By early 2011, it had been signed. Documents registered with Daniel Ek’s holding company in Cyprus would confirm the details. An “Exit Payment Agreement”—signed on January 25, 2011—stated that Universal had the right to two percent of the total purchase price if Spotify was sold or listed.

With Spotify’s valuation about to hit a billion dollars, that extra payment would have amounted to $20 million at the time of signing. Two years later, the same share of Spotify’s valuation had risen to $80 million. It would only be paid out, however, if Spotify was sold or taken public.

For the music industry, there was an upside in letting Spotify remain independent. A dedicated music service in which the major labels held equity would be easier to control and might be used as a counterweight to Apple or Google.

The “schmuck insurance” deal was seen as a win for Universal, but it may also have served the interests of Steve Jobs. After all, it reduced Daniel Ek’s incentive to sell Spotify to one of his competitors, like Microsoft or Google. At this point, the Swede had held acquisition talks with both of them.

The prospect of Google acquiring Spotify would have been especially irritating to Jobs. A leaked email from this period, written by the Apple CEO, would show that he viewed music as a weapon in a “holy war” with the search giant. When it came to music, his main plan seems to have been to strengthen iTunes and keep it out of Google’s Android phones.

Despite having secured a potentially lucrative side deal, Universal kept stalling throughout the spring of 2011. Spotify’s recently imposed streaming caps caused the number of monthly active users—still hovering around seven million—to decline for the first time in Spotify’s history.

“Very few companies get to stare negative growth in the face and live to talk about it,” as the CPO, Gustav Söderström, would recall.

The growth scare made gaining access to the United States even more urgent. Daniel Ek’s company was shrinking in Europe, running out of money, and still didn’t have its US licenses. Yuri Milner and the other investors remained on the sidelines. Spotify’s founders had to ask their shareholders for a bridge loan to cover salaries and keep the money flowing to the music labels.

Then, after months of silence, Universal Music dropped a bombshell on the Spotify leadership.

Sometime in late May or early June, the world’s largest record label informed them that Lucian Grainge wanted ten percent of the company in exchange for granting it licenses in the US, as two sources on either side of the negotiations would recall. It was an extraordinary ask. Universal was effectively demanding to receive additional shares worth $100 million before handing over the keys to the world’s largest music market.

The message is said to have been delivered to Spotify over the phone by Rob Wells, Universal’s head of digital. Privately, Wells was embarrassed by his boss’s audacity, as were several other members of his team at Universal, three sources would recall. One of them described the process as “humiliating.”

The next day, Ken Parks showed up at the Universal complex on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, for a long, emotional meeting with Rob Wells. Somehow, two sources said, the two of them hashed out a deal. The talks were held in Wells’s office right next door to Lucian Grainge, and the Universal CEO is said to have been involved as well.

Universal did not end up getting ten percent of Spotify’s shares. They received licensing terms that they could live with and the Exit Payment Agreement. The cherry on top was a lump of cash, as several sources would recall.

What additional sweetener was worked out in Santa Monica would remain a secret. One source, however, would describe a second “schmuck insurance,” in which Universal was promised an additional cash payment if the founders sold Spotify within a shorter time frame.

Lucian Grainge is said to have signed off on the deal at the end of the day. And with that, a crucial part of the Spotify catalogue was cleared and ready to stream in the US.

On June 6, 2011, Steve Jobs stepped up on stage for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. As usual, he was wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck, but the clothes hung from his body like sheets. He looked fragile, thinner than ever before.

Steve Jobs’s health was failing, yet he was still delivering the most important presentation of the day.

He explained how a new, overarching cloud infrastructure would replace the Mac as the core of Apple’s ecosystem, uniting all its products—including its music service.

Jobs then described how all the songs customers bought on iTunes would now be available on all devices, from the Mac to the iPhone to the iPad.

Apple’s CEO had just taken iTunes halfway into the age of streaming. And he’d done it before Spotify had had the chance to launch in the US.

Steve Jobs gazed triumphantly over the sea of faces that had gathered for what would be his last keynote.

All that remained for Spotify was a deal with Warner, who had been playing hardball with them all year.

In January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Warner’s Michael Nash had told two Spotify staffers that the label would never let the company into the US with its free service intact, according to two sources.

“Never is a long time,” Ken Parks is said to have replied, before cutting the meeting short.

Throughout the spring, Spotify and Warner were at a standstill, unable to agree on the future of the free tier. Spotify had deals with Sony and Universal by summer. Then, the negotiating team had enough confidence to turn the tables on Warner. They relayed that Spotify would love to have them onboard, but that they now had a launch date and would enter the US even without the Warner catalogue. By this time, Warner had too much to lose by not signing on.

Besides, the label had recently been acquired by Access Industries, whose billionaire owner, Len Blavatnik, was expected to modernize Warner’s business. The deal meant that the influence of its long-serving CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr., was waning. In late June or early July, Warner agreed to the terms and cleared Spotify’s path to the United States.

Spotify now had fulfilled all three of their promises to the new investors. They had renewed the licenses in Europe and finally gained access to the US market. The partnership with Facebook was coming along, too.

During the summer, Spotify re-upped on venture capital. The three new shareholders—Yuri Milner’s DST, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins—transferred around $100 million to Spotify’s parent company in Luxembourg.

Doggedness, dedication and chaotic music-industry dealmaking had gotten the Swedish startup over the line.

“And boom, we’re a billion-dollar company,” one Spotify executive would recall.

A few weeks later, Spotify had all but entered the US market—but Spotify’s communications director, Angela Watts, still wasn’t taking calls from reporters. There were a few final details to iron out in the Warner contract.

On a Tuesday afternoon in July, Daniel Ek found himself pacing around the Spotify offices on Eighth Avenue, his two cell phones vibrating constantly.

“People are prepared to pay for convenience,” the twenty-eight-year-old CEO told a reporter from the New York Times.

“If you want to take your music with you, you shouldn’t have to worry about fifteen different sync programs or anything else. It ought to be as simple as pressing play and it works.”

The following afternoon, Warner signed the final deal. Spotify’s press team did not waste any time getting the news out, beginning with a select number of influencers.

“So excited Spotify is FINALLY coming to the US tomorrow!” Britney Spears wrote on Twitter.

Users in the United States were offered an ad-free version with unlimited desktop listening for five dollars per month. For twice that, they could save songs offline and listen on their cell phones. As with previous launches, free users initially needed an invitation to get started.

“New Service Offers Music by Quantity, Not by Song,” read the headline in the New York Times. The article outlined the differences between iTunes, Spotify, and file-sharing.

The following week was a victory lap for Daniel Ek. He traveled across the United States with Shakil Khan at breakneck speed. They went from New York to San Francisco and on to Los Angeles. They stayed at a boutique hotel in West Hollywood and dined at the celebrity chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Then they went to San Jose and to the Aspen ski resort in Colorado.

Shak’s trail of tweets indicates a kind of giddy anticipation. At one airport, he joked that Daniel had pretended not to know him while passing through security.

“Me: Daniel, where are we going? He: Sssssh, pretend you don’t know me, I don’t want to be strip-searched like you,” Shak wrote on Twitter.

Spotify’s PR team in New York had kicked into high gear, supplying certain celebrities with invites. Shakira and 50 Cent were just two of the many artists that would spray the public with free accounts. When The Verge held a raffle with a hundred invites, the “giveaways” were gone inside nine minutes. The PR team was pushing up demand by creating a feeling of scarcity.

“I tried to pull some strings, this is the best I can do,” wrote Ashton Kutcher, sending out a link with invites.

Whether the supply was really that limited is another matter. Angela Watts had, for example, given Motorola and Sprite one hundred thousand invites each to pass on to their customers. Spotify proved, once again, that it knew how to leverage its exclusivity and generate buzz.

Even before the US launch, Spotify had more paying subscribers than rivals like Rhapsody, MOG, and Rdio. With eight million users and 1.6 million paid subscribers, Daniel Ek was about to strengthen his position in music streaming.

The Spotify CEO celebrated his company’s arrival in the US at a party in a huge, faux Louis XVI-style mansion overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It had marble pillars, pools, its own cinema, and belonged to Spotify’s new investor, an absent Yuri Milner.

One of Daniel’s old friends attended the party. Unaccustomed to valet parking, he left his car outside the gates, and would have to walk hundreds of yards to reach the house.

Daniel’s first triumph on American soil was celebrated in one of the most expensive private homes in the country. Fifteen minutes away, in Palo Alto, lay Steve Jobs’s modest brick home. His challenger from Stockholm had finally arrived.