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BY 2017, THERE WAS NO turning back. Spotify had to go public, and Daniel Ek dreaded it. Holding quarterly presentations and keeping investment bankers happy was not how he had envisioned leading a tech company. He had no desire to ring the opening bell on the stock exchange or give loads of interviews. But an IPO was the only way he could provide a lucrative exit for his early investors, while at the same time retaining control over his company.

Plenty of challenges lay ahead. Spotify had a loan, which risked costing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in discounted shares, that needed to be paid off. The company had to get closer to turning a profit. Daniel and his CFO also needed to devise a strategy that would show Wall Street that Spotify was moving up the food chain, and becoming less reliant on the music labels—in other words, that their profits would grow substantially over time.

Some of this was familiar territory. The Spotify CEO had delivered quarterly briefs to a limited group of shareholders for years, and the company’s stock had been trading through a variety of brokers in the secondary market. Big names were waiting for a chance to invest in Spotify. Many of the world’s best-known names in finance and tech were already lined up, hoping for a piece of the action.

To reduce its losses, Spotify once again needed to improve its licensing terms with the music labels. The negotiations were led by Spotify’s chief content officer, the mild-mannered Stefan Blom, who was based in New York. His goal was to ensure that Spotify would retain a larger portion of its revenue than before. The hard-hitting CFO, Barry McCarthy, had made his view clear: It was unacceptable that Spotify, when all the payouts to labels and publishers were complete, only kept around fifteen cents on the dollar.

Toward the end of 2016, negotiations with Universal were at an impasse, which took its toll on Stefan. Daniel Ek had provided the forty-four-year-old father with a luxurious four-room apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but his work was so demanding that he hardly had time to see his family. His life was essentially a series of nonstop flights to and from Stockholm, London, and Los Angeles to get the label deals over the line.

As usual, Daniel had impossibly high expectations of his executive team. Stefan Blom would rarely push back.

“His weakness was perhaps that he wasn’t very good at saying no to Daniel,” one of his colleagues would recall.

Despite having been in the US for six years, Spotify’s free tier was still controversial. Stefan found himself caught between tough-talking label heads and his own demanding bosses. In the end, Barry McCarthy and Spotify’s general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, were said to have swooped in and dragged the deal across the line.

“I congratulate Daniel on Spotify’s continued growth and innovation,” Universal’s CEO, Lucian Grainge, said in a written statement when the new deal was signed in April 2017.

The press release made no mention that the negotiations had stood still for several months. One of Spotify’s main concessions to Universal was to let its major artists, like Drake and Taylor Swift, release albums exclusively to Spotify’s premium subscribers for the first two weeks. For the record label, the arrangement was reminiscent of an age in which newly released albums were priced higher than the rest and still sold the most copies in record stores. For Spotify, however, it was another case of the free tier being diluted.

Stefan Blom signed similar deals with Merlin, the digital rights agency for independent record labels, and Sony Music. Then Warner Music, still the caboose of the negotiating process, agreed to their terms. The talks progressed partly because the music industry stood to gain from a successful IPO. The big three still owned more than ten percent of Spotify and understood that if the deals were welcomed by investors, their shares would go up in value.

Once the new licenses went into effect, Spotify went from earning fifteen cents to twenty-five cents on every dollar. The revenue split Spotify had aimed for—with labels and publishers taking 70 percent and Spotify keeping 30 percent—rarely worked out in practice. This was largely because the growth of the company’s free service would end up costing it extra money every year. Under the terms of the new deals, though, growing the free tier of Spotify became considerably less expensive.

Stefan was relieved. He’d survived the most intense part of his professional career, but new challenges were just around the corner.

In December 2017, Daniel Ek gathered the senior directors of his content team. Spotify’s CEO said that he was pleased with the new licenses, but he also questioned if Stefan was up for another tour of duty at the top of the company.

Daniel was now more comfortable making tough managerial decisions. He was inspired by Netflix, where leaders would refer to the company as a “team,” not a “family,” meaning underperformers could be swapped out at any time. Ek had also taken to a concept devised by LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Hoffman, in giving his top executives time-capped assignments. Every “mission,” as he called them, ran for approximately two years. After that, they could either take on new responsibilities or leave the company. In an interview, Daniel would explain that Spotify was the kind of shapeshifting growth company where it was hard for the top brass to manage more than two or three missions before moving on.

With the IPO just a few months away, the Spotify founder seemed unsure if Blom could take things to the next level. Daniel would describe how he asked his executive the same question over and over. Finally, Stefan produced the answer his boss was expecting. In early 2018, he put in his last day at Spotify after more than five years of service.

Daniel Ek—who would point to Stefan’s departure as an example of his management style—personally took over his former colleague’s duties and began to look for a successor.

Stefan’s abrupt exit would stir up feelings not just among Spotify alumni, but also in the music industry. Ek did not say much about it until he, after the Spotify IPO, recounted the episode in an interview with Fast Company. In the article, Ek appeared eager to show Wall Street that he could act resolutely if ever his top people were found wanting.

Yet few sources who had worked for Ek could recall any firing as dramatic as that of Stefan Blom. Many described how Daniel appeared to be developing a ruthless edge as CEO.

But several former colleagues said that publicly airing out the argument with Stefan—who had been “very loyal”—felt like an unnecessary move.

For decades, tech founders had tended to list their companies on the Nasdaq stock market in New York. This was true of Microsoft in 1986 and Google in 2004. But after Facebook’s tumultuous IPO in 2012, the trend was broken. Twitter, Alibaba, and Snap all chose the New York Stock Exchange, with its famous pediment and columned facade on Wall Street. That was Daniel Ek’s first choice, too.

In the spring of 2017, Spotify recruited several new board members. One of them was Cristina Stenbeck, principal owner of the Swedish investment company Kinnevik and seasoned tech veteran. Her track record spanned from Avito, a Russian version of Craigslist or eBay, to the German e-commerce giant Zalando.

Two other newcomers were Disney’s former chief operating officer Tom Staggs, and Shishir Mehrotra, a former product design director at YouTube. The last new recruit was Padmasree Warrior, an old friend of Shakil Khan’s who had served on the board of Microsoft since 2015. She was now the CEO of the US division of the electric car manufacturer NIO. All four were independent board members, which meant Spotify now lived up to the requirements of US financial authorities.

To make way for the new board, several people had to step aside. This marked the end of Sean Parker’s formal ties to Spotify, a company he had made significant inroads for in the United States. He had arranged parties, lobbied behind the scenes, and done countless interviews talking up streaming, and the Swedish service in particular. He even strongly defended Spotify when Mark Zuckerberg wanted to limit its exposure on Facebook. But it had now been years since he argued Spotify’s case in public.

As the IPO neared, Sean Parker’s Founders Fund was not on the Spotify cap table, according to confidential documents. Sean, however, still held a small personal stake in the company. The other outgoing board members were Klaus Hommels, the angel investor and early Facebook backer, and Pär-Jörgen Pärson, who had followed Martin Lorentzon since the late 1990s. Soon, Pärson’s venture fund, Northzone, would send record-breaking returns back to its investors.

Barry McCarthy would soon propose an unconventional way of going public. Instead of enlisting investment banks and raising a huge amount of capital by issuing new stock, he wished to simply register Spotify’s shares on the stock market and have unrestricted trading begin.

It was called a direct public offering, or DPO. Barry explained that Spotify could save time and money by raising capital on the private market ahead of the float. Daniel liked what he heard. The company’s shares were already trading at a record-breaking volume on the secondary market, so perhaps the company wouldn’t need banks to prop up the share price during its first weeks on the New York Stock Exchange.

There was, perhaps, an added benefit to the direct listing. The “schmuck insurance” deal that Spotify had signed with Universal to enter the US market was still in effect, as one person would recall. That deal stipulated that if Spotify were sold or listed, Universal would receive an additional two percent of the purchase price. The money would come directly from Spotify’s earliest shareholders. At this point, that percentage was the equivalent of $200 million, and the sum was about to grow.

But the secret agreement with Universal was never triggered. One person familiar with the details speculated it was because of the direct listing. In their unconventional process, Spotify’s founders may have found a way to duck out of the costly and confidential arrangement.

As the IPO in New York drew closer, Spotify braced for the scrutiny that would come from authorities and media outlets alike. The Securities and Exchange Commission would be looking closely at everything from business contracts to its accounting, and the background of every person with significant influence at the company.

Daniel Ek may have wondered whether that level of scrutiny would also apply to his close friend and adviser, Shakil Khan. During 2017, Daniel got drawn into a family feud between Shak and his older brother, Tanweer. The spat would create headlines in a range of international news outlets.

Tanweer, who felt that Shak had spoken ill of their father when he appeared on a podcast, was convinced that Spotify and Daniel Ek were not being forthright about the amount of influence his brother held at the company. He sent more than seventy emails to Shak, Daniel, and a Spotify investor claiming that the company was trying to tone down Shak’s role ahead of going public.

Tanweer suggested that Spotify and Daniel were nervous about Shak’s past, which included several convictions, one of them a “serious drug offense.”

“Once a company moves onto the market, journalists have a habit of digging up in the strangest of places to find some very bizarre answers that can leave companies a little bit embarrassed,” Tanweer wrote in one of his emails to Daniel.

Daniel did not respond, instead asking his general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, to step in. Gutierrez stressed that their “patience had run out” regarding Tanweer’s “unfounded claims and misguided threats.”

“I’m hoping we can avoid the costly and protracted actions that will follow, including those involving your employer, so and [sic] I’m reaching out to you in good faith to discuss before we act,” Gutierrez wrote.

According to Tanweer, Shak had described himself as Spotify’s “head of special projects” on LinkedIn as late as 2018, despite having claimed to step down from that role six years prior. He would also point out that Daniel had tweeted, after Shak’s apparent departure, that the Brit would soon be “hustling” for his company again.

In practice, Tanweer argued, his younger brother had been serving as Daniel’s number two, effectively as co-CEO. A person with that amount of influence would ordinarily be declared openly in an IPO filing.

Tanweer wanted Spotify to “provide full details about Shak’s background so that the reasonable investor can make an informed decision about whether to invest or not,” according to court documents in the UK.

According to Shak, the conflict between him and his brother had begun when Tanweer was starting his company Carbaya, an online platform for selling used cars. Tanweer had described Shak as a key adviser to the company, which Shak denied.

“In fact, I had nothing to do with Carbaya,” Shak said in his witness statement.

In early 2018, two months before the IPO, Shak brought his brother before the UK High Court, arguing that he was being harassed. Ultimately, the judge decided not to move forward with an injunction against Tanweer, arguing that the impact on Shak did not “go much beyond annoyance and distress.”

The ordeal is said to have taken a high personal toll on Shak, who had already been shaken by a heart attack one year prior. As Spotify approached its listing, his LinkedIn profile stated that he was merely an “investor and advisor” to the company.

Once Spotify’s dense IPO filing surfaced, amounting to 200-plus pages, the name of Daniel Ek’s long-time consigliere was nowhere to be found.

As signs of Spotify’s listing started to spread, the company’s valuation began skyrocketing on the secondary market. It reached its peak just before the IPO on Wall Street in April 2018. Rarely have shares in an unlisted company traded so intensively. Daniel Ek would soon seize on an opportunity to strengthen his control over the company.

Many of Spotify’s early employees had become millionaires. Key figures such as Sophia Bendz, Mengmeng Du, and Jonathan Forster had converted their stock options and sold off large amounts of shares. Andreas Ehn, Spotify’s first CTO, was said to have earned tens of millions of dollars on his stock options. In the early days, he owned one percent of the company.

The early employee with the largest uptick was Ludvig Strigeus, who held five percent of the company after he sold μTorrent to the Spotify founders back in 2006. His percentage had shrunk as new investors came in, but the share price kept rising. Between 2014 and 2017, the self-taught coder sold shares worth north of $30 million, but that was only a fraction of his total holdings.

Besides being a fantastic investment for venture capital funds, Spotify also enriched many influential private investors. One of them was Ian Osborne, who had advised companies like Uber and individuals such as the former UK Prime Minister David Cameron. Another was the US hedge fund tycoon Robert Citrone.

Throughout 2017, every new licensing agreement signed by Spotify sent the share price up. In April, when the deal with Universal was finally finished, the price jumped by 50 percent to $2,700 per share. Suddenly, Spotify was valued at around $10 billion, nearly four times what eBay had paid for Skype in 2005. For a Swedish tech company, Spotify’s new valuation was enormous; yet this was only the beginning of a remarkable ascent.

The titans of the tech world had now begun to circle Spotify like sharks in shallow water. They followed its impressive growth in paid subscribers and saw how Netflix, another streaming service, was making a splash on the New York Stock Exchange. Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, explored buying a large stake in Spotify, according to two sources. Softbank’s Vision Fund was currently betting around $20 billion a year on tech companies like WeWork and, in late 2017, Uber. But according to one rumor, things had soured between Masayoshi Son and Martin Lorentzon, who had somehow managed to offend the sixty-year-old Japanese executive.

The global appetite for Spotify stock benefited swaths of brokers and bankers in Stockholm’s financial district. Investment banks such as GP Bullhound would facilitate deals on the secondary market, taking a cut on every transaction. One person who tended to take the bait was Martin Söderström, an energetic young businessman whose wife Charlotte was the daughter of the clothing giant H&M’s majority owner, Stefan Persson. The Perssons now had an investment fund, managed by Martin Söderström. In the fall of 2017, the fund held 0.7 percent of Spotify. Martin Söderström would constantly scoop up small positions under the banner of DIG Investment, a name that originally stood for Djursholm Investment Group, taking its label from the wealthy area where Sofia Ek had grown up.

By the time the licenses from all the major labels were in place, Spotify’s shares had shot up to $4,000 each. The share price had doubled in just over six months. The closer the IPO came, the harder it was to find sellers. As one source would recall, Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba, placed an order to buy at least $50 million of Spotify shares. But by this time, its shareholders had started to exercise their “right of first refusal,” which meant they had first dibs on any share sale. That effectively put an end to all transactions with third parties. By the time Jack Ma arrived, the game was gone.

At its peak, the secondary-market trading in Spotify was more intense than for any other unlisted tech company, as one person in finance put it. Shares in US tech companies like Uber and Airbnb would also be traded on the private markets, but in their case, rigid US shareholder agreements would block many of the deals. Daniel Ek could have stopped the secondary trades in Spotify, but he didn’t—the trading put upward pressure on the share price, and it allowed his employees to cash in on their stock options. When reputable financial institutions got on the cap table, it also boded well for the IPO.

Some of the busiest buyers were the hedge fund managers at Tiger Global in New York City. When a large option package for Spotify’s staff vested in early 2017, the company encouraged employees wishing to sell to turn to Tiger Global. The firm was an offshoot from Tiger Management, a hedge fund run by the legendary stock investor Julian Robertson between 1980 and 2000. During the fall of 2017, Tiger Global’s managers asked various investment bankers to find Spotify shareholders willing to sell. Since they were being contacted by brokers representing different institutions, many got the impression that the demand was high. This may, in turn, have driven up the price.

Shortly, Tiger became one of Spotify’s biggest shareholders. By December 2017, the fund owned six percent of the company, and they would soon come close to Daniel Ek on the list of the largest holdings. But the CEO had no need to worry. It would later be revealed that Tiger’s top executives—the billionaire Chase Coleman and the internet investors Lee Fixel and Scott Shleifer—had transferred their voting rights to the Spotify founder.

It was the same trick that Yuri Milner had deployed when he turned Spotify into a unicorn in 2011. He’d invested tens of millions of dollars without taking a seat on the board. Daniel got the money he needed but didn’t have to relinquish any formal control.

At this point, the billion-dollar valuation of Spotify from 2011 looked almost quaint. Yuri Milner’s firm, DST Global, had sold its last shares in Spotify just before Christmas of 2015, when the share price was $1,800. Two years later, the shares were worth more than twice that.

By the end of 2017, Spotify was valued at $16 billion on the secondary market. And Daniel Ek was about to push that figure even further.

Signs of some new, mystery investor began to show in the spring of 2017, when Chinese delegations started visiting the Spotify headquarters at Jarla House. Employees began to hear the word “Tencent.” The Chinese tech giant would soon become an important Spotify ally.

Tencent had been founded in November 1998 by Ma Huateng—better known as Pony Ma—and his four co-founders. Tencent’s first product was an unapologetic rip-off of ICQ, the popular desktop chat tool that Daniel Ek once used to woo girls in high school.

In the late 1990s, Pony Ma had just enough imagination to call his version IOCQ. After complaints from AOL, the owner of ICQ, he renamed it QQ. Within a few years, the instant-messaging platform would attract hundreds of millions of users.

As Tencent advanced, Pony Ma became known for encouraging competition within the group. Sometimes he’d build several teams with similar assignments and let them duke it out in order to arrive at the best product.

In 2004, Tencent went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Its breakthrough moment would not come until seven years later, with the launch of WeChat. By 2017, WeChat had evolved into a social network that covered anything from payments to mobile games to news. It was quickly approaching one billion active users.

Like many Chinese tech giants, Tencent was controversial in the West. Chinese authorities would soon admit that they could erase messages in WeChat, which seemed to tie Tencent closely to the regime. Tencent had also launched a new streaming service, QQ Music, which had recently merged with China Music Corporation’s two competitors, Kugou and Kuwo. The three music services had become one, and the new company would soon come to be known as Tencent Music.

Music streaming was only one area in which Tencent was gaining ground. In the 2010s, the company began to invest widely in the global tech sector. Within a few years, Tencent had invested heavily in Tesla, the ride-sharing service Lyft, and Epic Games, whose hit Fortnite swept over the world in 2017.

Like Yuri Milner, Pony Ma won favors by taking a passive role in his portfolio companies. In October of 2017, he bought twelve percent of the shares in Snap, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and relinquished his voting rights. In the months leading up to the Snap deal, he had also been interested in acquiring all of Spotify, as two sources would recall.

Tencent’s talks with Daniel Ek were said to have begun cautiously. The initial idea was a partnership between Spotify and Tencent Music. But over time, Tencent made it clear that they would be ready to buy the Swedish outfit for around $20 billion. The idea was to merge the two into one. According to one source, Daniel was offered the role of CEO of the new company. Spotify’s Chinese counterpart already had hundreds of millions of users in China, but far fewer paying subscribers.

Publicly, Daniel had often proclaimed that he wouldn’t sell Spotify. Privately, his stance was slightly more flexible. To his executives, he would maintain that selling would only become an option if the deal would provide a better platform to deliver on the company’s vision. The proposal from Tencent, with him as chief executive, looked like it might fulfill his criteria. Yet the Spotify founder was hesitant, viewing an acquisition by Tencent as a backup plan, much as he had with Microsoft and Google in 2010, and with Google again in 2013. He and the Spotify board ultimately decided that they would rather take the streaming giant public, and remain independent.

“Daniel and Martin have always wanted to negotiate with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Tencent to understand the strategic value of the company. But I don’t think they’ve ever had the intention of selling,” one source would recall.

But the negotiations with Tencent did not stop there. In the fall, executives from both companies forged a new plan based on Spotify and Tencent swapping shares in each other’s companies. Spotify would stay out of China, while Tencent would invest in Spotify at a high valuation and help the company clear its debts. The deal was finalized, and in mid-December, the Spotify press department sent out the press release.

“This transaction will allow both companies to benefit from the global growth of music streaming,” Daniel said in a written statement.

In practice, Spotify was allocated shares in Tencent and Tencent Music worth a total of one billion dollars. Tencent acquired shares in Spotify worth just as much. Tencent also bought convertible loans from several of Spotify’s lenders for around $600 million, and converted them into shares in the company. The lenders who sold to Tencent had thus seen their investments double in value. The remaining lenders would also convert their loans into Spotify shares.

Suddenly, Daniel had the kind of anchor investor that normally came with an IPO. Tencent even echoed a traditional listing by agreeing not to sell its shares within a certain time period. In this case, the lock-in wasn’t a few months, but three whole years.

The new shares Spotify had issued to Tencent held a price of $5,300. That pegged Spotify’s valuation at a whopping $25 billion. That share price had effectively set the floor for Spotify’s listing, which was now only weeks away.

Within a year, Spotify had tripled its valuation. It was now worth more than the telecoms giant Ericsson, one of Sweden’s largest public companies. Daniel Ek had paved the way for a grand entrance on the New York Stock Exchange.

To please Wall Street, Daniel Ek and Barry McCarthy had started to identify a number of new ways to make money, even ones that would set them up for a clash with the major labels.

One of these ideas had been kicking around Spotify for a few years. It revolved around shifting listeners, even slightly, away from music owned by the major labels and toward songs that were less expensive to license. At scale, that could make a big difference to Spotify’s bottom line.

Another project, grown out of the Spotify for Artists platform, was meant to bring the company closer to creators and producers. From a business perspective, it made sense for Spotify to move from being a distributor of music to becoming a destination for consumers and creators alike. This was a red flag to the major labels. So, Spotify would inch forward while drawing a firm line that they promised not to cross.

“We do not own rights, we’re not a label, all our music is licensed from rightsholders and we pay them—we don’t pay ourselves,” a Spotify spokesperson wrote in an email to Billboard magazine in the summer of 2017.

Just a few days later, Daniel found himself under attack. Music Business Worldwide had published a list of fifty unknown artists whose music was trending on some of Spotify’s major playlists, such as “Peaceful Piano” and “Music for Concentration.” All together, the tracks had been streamed more than five hundred million times. Anonymous sources in the music industry railed against what they dubbed “fake artists.”

It emerged that Spotify had licensed music from a Stockholm-based tech company, Epidemic Sound, who would sell access to a database full of music by no-name musicians to YouTubers and the film and TV industry.

The optics were bad. While Apple was signing multi-million-dollar contracts with huge pop stars, Daniel Ek seemed to be peddling a catalog of filler music. Spotify retained a larger portion of the revenue on the songs but had to face the criticism that they were watering down their catalogue. By July 2017, almost 1,500 tracks from Epidemic Sound had found their way onto Spotify. That number would keep growing.

“We’ve found a need for content,” Spotify’s policy and communications director Jonathan Prince said in a statement that appeased few label executives.

Daniel had also started taking an interest in a researcher named François Pachet, who had spent twenty years working at Sony. The Frenchman believed that hit songs could be created through artificial intelligence. His interpretive AI engine was used to scan dozens or hundreds of tracks in order to interpret and replicate their style.

Often, the computer would make independent decisions, such as inserting a few chords from the beginning of the Beatles’ song “Michelle” into a bridge of one of its creations. In another project, François Pachet and his colleagues asked the AI engine to emulate pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach. A survey later showed that more than half of the listeners thought the AI-powered songs were Bach’s own work.

In mid-2017, François Pachet became head of Daniel’s new Creator Technology Research Lab in Paris. There, he would develop AI tools intended to help artists create new music. One of Pachet’s colleagues was already producing AI music together with actual musicians. The band appeared on Spotify under the pseudonym SKYGGE, whose album Hello World got around ten million streams on Spotify in 2018. The AI engine didn’t claim royalties, and never staged a Spotify boycott.

A few months later, just as Spotify was about to submit its IPO filing, Daniel made a move to get closer to independent artists. He announced the acquisition of Soundtrap, a startup that had spent the last six years moving from one run-down office to another in Stockholm.

Soundtrap’s software let musicians create and record music collaboratively, in real time, without being in the room together. The service targeted amateur musicians and schools, which used it as a teaching tool.

At first, Daniel had sought a partnership with Soundtrap, but by the summer of 2017, his team was looking to buy the whole company. Soundtrap’s users generally weren’t fully-fledged artists but, Daniel figured, the better they got, the deeper their relationship to Spotify would become.

In the long run, the service could evolve into a new source of music for Spotify, helping the company become less dependent on the established record companies.

While it was low on revenue, Soundtrap had received nearly $8 million in venture capital. Among the owners were the local VC firm Industrifonden, and Spotify’s former CFO, Peter Sterky. Daniel’s executives had to make several bids, but Soundtrap relented when it became clear that Spotify would give them free rein once the deal was done.

“We share Spotify’s vision of democratizing music,” Soundtrap’s CEO, Per Emanuelsson, said after signing the deal in November 2017.

The price tag was secret, but ended up being around $60 million, largely paid in Spotify shares.

Some of Soundtrap’s shareholders would later brag about the price tag in private. They found it remarkable, given that the company had virtually no revenue.

In March 2018, Daniel Ek and some of his top executives faced a gathering of Wall Street analysts for Spotify’s Investor Day. It was a cool affair, held at Spring Studios in the trendy neighborhood of Tribeca, home to many celebrities in lower Manhattan.

“Please welcome to the stage: founder and CEO Daniel Ek,” a voice thundered through the speakers.

Daniel stepped out in black jeans, a black suit jacket, white t-shirt, and a fresh pair of white Nike Air Force One sneakers.

“All right! Good afternoon, everyone,” he said, welcoming the audience to Spotify’s version of a capital markets day.

He spoke with the same conviction as when he pitched investors during Spotify’s early years. But the balding, twenty-four-year-old founder in a bunchy pullover was gone. He now looked lean and fit, almost completely transformed from the Daniel Ek the US public had seen glimpses of over the years. He was now a handsome thirty-five-year-old whose boyhood dream had become worth $25 billion.

“For us, going public has never really been about the pomp and circumstance of it all. So you won’t see us ringing any bells or throwing any parties,” Daniel said, bashfully.

A few weeks earlier, Spotify had made its IPO filing public. Besides giving an exhaustive picture of the operations, the cap table revealed that several old timers—such as Martin Lorentzon’s old partner Felix Hagnö and the coding genius Ludvig Strigeus—still owned shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It also showed that Sony Music was Spotify’s fifth-largest owner, with almost 6 percent of the company.

Tencent had climbed past Daniel Ek and was now Spotify’s second-largest shareholder, with just over 9 percent of the shares; but the CEO’s influence had increased. Through stock bonus incentives and a certificate program, he and Martin—the largest owner, with 12 percent of the company—could control 80 percent of the votes. The setup resembled the dual-class voting structures that the founders of Google and Facebook had popularized.

On stage, Daniel addressed Spotify’s reputation for secrecy by stating that the company had always acted transparently—just not toward the outside world.

“Transparency is really a key pillar of our culture. It’s always been. It’s just who we are and how we do things. We just haven’t done it externally to the same extent as internally,” he explained.

Then he laid out Spotify’s new strategy for the first time: the company aimed to become a technology-driven layer between the fans and artists. This “two-sided marketplace” would allow the company to gain revenue from both listeners and creators alike. Spotify’s constant stream of data revealed which tracks deserved a place in the programmed playlists, which now comprised almost a third of what people were listening to. This system could thus be used to control demand in the music industry.

The Spotify CEO underscored his point by mentioning Dermot Kennedy, who as recently as 2015 was still strumming his guitar on the streets of Dublin. The Irish singer-songwriter had uploaded a handful of songs to Spotify and, without the backing of any large label, gotten picked up by the algorithmic playlist Discover Weekly, reaching millions of listeners. Now he was touring all over the world and living off of his art.

In its IPO filing, Spotify also mentioned Lauv, an artist who was relatively anonymous until one of his songs ended up on the playlist Today’s Top Hits. Millions of streams followed, and 70 percent of them came from playlists managed by Spotify.

“I think this is such an important part of the Spotify opportunity, because this is the part that nobody else is doing,” Daniel said.

Then he proceeded to use a word with magical properties in the world of tech and finance.

“Some people say Spotify is disrupting the music industry. But I think we’re really just part of the evolution of the music industry,” he said.

Though neither he nor his audience knew it at the time, the buzz around the new marketplace strategy would soon fade. Its most aggressive feature—a service that let artists upload their music directly to Spotify, bypassing the traditional structure—only went live for a short time in 2019. Spotify may have ended the experiment as a concession to the record labels.

At Investor Day, the next speaker was Spotify’s product guru Gustav Söderström. He stepped onto the stage in a dark-blue collared shirt, tight blue jeans, and brown leather shoes and explained that Spotify was sitting on 200 petabytes of data detailing its listeners’ behavior.

Gustav described Spotify as a data-driven, scalable company to the room full of Wall Street analysts.

Later, Barry McCarthy would spell out that Spotify was still putting growth before profits. As long as the company’s total projected revenue per new user exceeded the cost of acquiring a new user, it made sense to expand.

Nine directors appeared on the stage that afternoon. All of them—except Danielle Lee, global head of partner solutions—were men.

When the lights went down, Spotify had done its best to put on a grand show for Wall Street. It was the company’s last concerted performance before going public a few weeks later.

On the Tuesday morning after Easter weekend, the sun stood low over the water in central Stockholm.

At eight thirty, Sophia Bendz was on her way to her office at the Alma members’ club. Since leaving her role at Spotify’s marketing department in late 2014, she had become an investor. Soon, she would become a partner at Atomico, the venture-capital firm founded by the Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström.

Walking across the Nybroviken dock, she took a picture of the sunrise over the Östermalm neighborhood. She was standing just a few blocks from Spotify’s early offices. The temperature hovered around freezing and the sky was clear blue.

“Looks like a great day to list a company,” she wrote, uploading the photo to Twitter.

Plenty of people shared her nostalgia. Magnus Hult, who sorted through Spotify’s entangled metadata at the office on Riddargatan, liked the tweet. So did the former product developer Michelle Kadir and Pär-Jörgen Pärson, whose firm Northzone had been a shareholder in Spotify for nearly ten years.

Throughout the day, Spotify veterans would write to each other in an alumni group on Facebook. All of them waited anxiously for the trading to open in New York. April 3, 2018, was a big day, even if Daniel Ek would do his utmost to tone it down.

A few hours later, it was morning in New York. Just before eight a.m., a security guard stepped into a small booth just inside the entrance at 11 Wall Street. Just over ninety minutes remained until the stock exchange would open, but the traders had already been taking orders for Spotify shares for an hour-plus.

The listing followed the stock exchange’s usual routine. Journalists passed through the security checkpoint well ahead of time. Staff at the business channel CNBC prepared their studio for a live broadcast just below the podium with the bell that would open the trading. But neither Daniel Ek nor Martin Lorentzon would be standing on that podium. The night before, Spotify’s CEO had explained why in an open letter.

“Of course, I am proud of what we’ve built over the last decade. But what’s even more important to me is that tomorrow does not become the most important day for Spotify,” he wrote as his company prepared for its big day.

In his signature, he once again quoted Daft Punk: “Harder, better, faster, stronger.”

Unlike a conventional IPO, there was no predetermined price range for Spotify’s shares. Instead, the intense secondary-market trading guided the stock traders setting the price. One of us, on assignment for the Swedish financial newspaper Dagens industri, was present that day. The traders on the floor said they had never seen anything like this process. This was the first ever direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Outside, the cold morning wind swept over the southern tip of Manhattan. The front of the stock exchange was covered in a large black banner with the green Spotify logo in the middle. Underneath were three American flags, one of which was about to be replaced.

On the ground floor of the building, the security guard stood by a wall full of shelves with flags in cardboard boxes. He found the countries starting with “S,” pulled a box off the shelf, and made his way to the second floor of the building.

About seventy blocks north, the man of the hour sat in a white leather chair. Daniel Ek had made his way to the western end of 57th Street, near the Hudson River, with his head of global communications, Dustee Jenkins. From here, CBS This Morning went live on air every weekday, drawing a full three million viewers.

Daniel, nursing a paper cup from Starbucks, made small talk with the host Gayle King. He was wearing a green polo shirt and an Apple Watch on his left wrist. On the air, he talked about how streaming was “not even a thing” before Apple Music launched. Now, his model was poised to take over.

“When you have all the world’s music in your pocket, you start listening to a lot more music than you ever did before,” Daniel said.

The last time the thirty-five-year-old was in this studio, Spotify had just introduced Moments, the unsuccessful music and video update that was supposed to follow users throughout their day. That was around the time of Taylor Swift’s boycott of the company. Now, three years later, Spotify had just enjoyed a payback moment. Taylor Swift had recently sent out a greeting to her followers.

“There is a brand new video for ‘Delicate’ coming out, only on Spotify, tonight. So check it out,” she wrote.

In the CBS studio, Daniel told the hosts how he had traveled “many, many” times to Nashville, Tennessee, to convince Taylor Swift to return to his service. A few days before Spotify’s IPO, the service premiered her latest video.

The conversation turned to reports that Apple Music was about to surpass Spotify in the US in terms of paying users.

Calm and prepared, Daniel said that Apple’s presence only makes the streaming market grow further.

“As someone who grew up in a working-class suburb of Stockholm, I couldn’t afford all the music. So back in ’98–’99, I was really thinking about how I could get all that music, and do it in a legal way, while compensating all the artists,” he said.

“So we’re now a decade into that journey, and I really just feel like we’re in the second inning,” Daniel said, borrowing a baseball term that made Gayle King chuckle.

Daniel was repeating the lesson Martin Lorentzon once stressed: never let an IPO become the primary target of a company. Yet Daniel did admit that he would be glancing at the share price.

During the tech boom of recent years, around a hundred companies had listed on the New York Stock Exchange every year. There were also about a hundred different flags stored in the lobby of the building. Around the time that Daniel Ek was being interviewed by CBS, the security guard stepped out onto the balcony and pulled down the American flag furthest to the right. He then hoisted a red one with a white cross in the middle.

A Swiss flag appeared next to the two American ones, under the gigantic Spotify banner. From the street below, one of us took a photo and posted it to Twitter.

News outlets from all over the world got in touch to publish the photo they had seen surface on social media. Reuters dubbed the story “the Swiss Miss,” and it quickly spread all over the world. After a few hours, the stock exchange’s press officers published a joke about Sweden and Switzerland in a tweet.

“We hope everyone enjoyed our momentary ode to our neutral role in the process of price discovery this morning,” they wrote.

On the day of Spotify’s IPO—April 3, 2018—a mishap on Wall Street saw the Swiss flag hoisted rather than that of Sweden. (Sven Carlsson)

Spotify’s IPO was almost four hours late. But at twelve thirty p.m., the order book closed. Sellers looking to offload 5.6 million shares had been matched with buyers.

At Spotify’s offices in New York, the staff followed the initial trades on TV screens. The stock opened at a price that put Spotify’s total worth at $29.5 billion, far higher than it had ever been.

Later that day, the stock price dropped. It closed at $149, which still made Spotify worth more than Snap, Twitter, and the Swedish clothing giant H&M. It also looked like Spotify had set a trend among tech companies preparing an IPO. Both Airbnb and Slack would reportedly explore the possibility of a direct listing.

Martin Lorentzon wasn’t in New York for Spotify’s first day of trading, but he did write several posts about it on social media. He also shared an article about the stock exchange raising the wrong flag, which appeared to amuse him. Of everyone celebrating Spotify’s meteoric rise, the forty-nine-year-old had become the richest. He still owned 12 percent of the company, which came out to more than $3 billion. For his unwavering belief in Daniel Ek’s idea, he was awarded nearly five hundred times his original investment.

Pär-Jörgen Pärson, the early investor, did not see as large a return. But Northzone’s profits from the Spotify deal were the highest for any European venture capital fund to date. The Spotify deal had put Pärson on the international map. The day following Spotify’s IPO, the Swedish investor visited the CNBC studio on the trading floor of the stock exchange.

The hosts asked him about the threat from Apple Music in the US market. Pär-Jörgen waved it off, saying that Apple remained strong within its own ecosystem, but weak outside of the world of the iPhone.

“It’s been part of the Spotify strategy from the outset to be pervasive and work on all kinds of devices. With Apple’s market share of about 20 percent, that naturally limits their reach,” he said.

A few months later, both Northzone and another early Swedish venture investor, Creandum, had sold most of their shares in Spotify. In all, they had made more than $2.5 billion on the company.

The former Stardoll CEO Mattias Miksche, who hired Daniel Ek when Spotify was nothing but an idea, was praised for his part in the company’s success. Early on, he had identified several of the young talents who would later build one of Sweden’s biggest companies.

“Big shout out to you Mattias,” the Swedish entrepreneur Alan Mamedi wrote on Twitter. Mattias Miksche answered him with a heart emoji.

By the end of Spotify’s first day of trading, Daniel Ek’s net worth was more than $2 billion. He wasn’t the only shareholder with a reason to celebrate. The early investor Felix Hagnö, the ingenious coder Ludvig Strigeus, and hedge fund magnate Robert Citrone had all made hundreds of millions of dollars.

One hot-button issue ahead of Spotify’s IPO had been how artists would be compensated if and when the labels sold their shares. The major labels owned more than 11 percent of the company, with Sony accounting for more than half of that portion. The generous stock option package Sony had been awarded ahead of Spotify’s US launch had paid off handsomely.

When the first day of trading ended, the labels owned shares collectively worth around $3 billion. In a move some thought would distance the label from Spotify, Sony quickly sold around half of its stake. The label then promised to share the money with artists and partner labels regardless of what they owed in unrecouped advances. The largest label, Universal, appeared to keep their shares.

Warner, meanwhile, would gradually sell all of its stock for around half a billion dollars. Of that, artists received nearly $300 million after taxes, having had only $12 million deducted to account for unrecouped advances. The major labels’ massive profits from Spotify shares were redistributed more fairly than many skeptics had feared.

About a third of Spotify’s now four thousand employees worked in Sweden, where the company had new headquarters. The newly constructed building, covered in copper-colored panels, spanned eight floors on Regeringsgatan in central Stockholm.

A few months after the IPO, Spotify invited members of the Swedish press to an “open house,” to have a look around and meet some of the company’s executives.

The lavish interiors included rooms for karaoke, pinball, ping pong, and even arts and crafts. It also featured a stage for presentations and performances, as well as a state-of-the-art music studio. Its sprawling roof terrace offered a view of the whole city; from the downtown skyscrapers to church spires in the Old Town and islands far out in the Stockholm archipelago. In the foreground was the Royal Palace and the island of Skeppsholmen, where Daniel Ek had taken countless walks to mull over difficult decisions with Martin Lorentzon and his top-level managers.

The gray, concrete high rises in Rågsved, where Spotify was given its name, were out of view. But looking northeast, the guests traced the journey from a small startup to a global company. Spotify’s first offices—on Riddargatan, Humlegårdsgatan, and Birger Jarlsgatan 6—were all located in the upscale area of Östermalm. Looking north, they could see the spire from Johannes church in central Stockholm. Right behind it was Jarla House, where Spotify had matured and become the world’s largest music-streaming service.

A few floors down, on the main stage, Daniel welcomed the visiting journalists. He sat down on a bar stool next to a delegation of his top directors and declared this an opportunity for a presentation followed by open questions. The few dozen journalists saw the moment as a shift for the notoriously secretive company; Daniel was said to dread press events, and rarely seemed satisfied with the published articles.

“We’ve talked about increasing the transparency within the company and for me, this is a step in that direction,” the Spotify founder said.

His fluent Swedish bore a faint flavor of American corporate speak. The Spotify press department joked that the company’s official language was “Swenglish,” a peculiar mixture of Swedish with English phrases and syntax mixed in.

Some in the Swedish business world would argue that Spotify was in fact no longer a Swedish company. Its parent company was based in Luxembourg, Daniel’s holding companies in Malta and Cyprus, and Spotify’s New York offices had recently outgrown the Stockholm headquarters in terms of headcount. And the company’s stock was trading on Wall Street.

“In general terms, I don’t find that very much has changed since the listing,” Daniel said.

He explained that Spotify’s IPO was the only viable alternative to selling the company. The early investors had to get their final payout.

“Ten years after launching, we felt it was time to honor that obligation,” he said.

The soft-spoken Swede had caused another stir within his industry. A new policy, introduced a few months prior, had stated that music with lyrics containing hate speech did not belong on Spotify’s curated and influential playlists. The policy also covered how artists conducted themselves outside of the studio.

Tracks by the R&B star R. Kelly, who had long been accused of sexual misconduct, were no longer being included in playlists like Discover Weekly. Another banished artist was XXXTentacion, who had been accused of assault, and Tay-K, a seventeen-year-old rapper from Texas who stood accused of two murders. It was not an issue of outright censorship. Their music could still be found in the Spotify catalogue.

To much of the hip-hop world, the policy made Daniel Ek appear culturally tone deaf. The label executive Anthony Tiffith—known within the industry as “Top”—would call the Swedish CEO and threaten to have his artists, among them the popular Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar, boycott Spotify.

The feud created fault lines between some of Spotify’s executives. Troy Carter, its global head of creator services, an African American who had been molded by hip-hop culture, felt ready to leave the company if they didn’t rescind the new rules. He was challenged by Spotify’s public policy director, Jonathan Prince, a white Georgetown grad who had once worked at the State Department under Barack Obama.

A few days after the flare up, Daniel Ek dropped the part of the new policy that regulated conduct and artist behavior. One of XXXTentacion’s songs made a comeback on the playlist Rap Caviar. But Spotify stuck to its decision not to promote music that contained hate speech.

When the issue came up at the press briefing in Stockholm, Daniel questioned whether he was the right person to decide what might be offensive to African Americans or other groups. He mentioned that Spotify had begun consulting organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US nonprofit known for its human rights work.

“My nirvana would be to take a concept that exists in Sweden, more like an ombudsman, and have an ethics board, and distribute the decision making so it’s not just Spotify, but actually a broader group,” the CEO said, adding that the issue was high on his agenda.

The conflict-averse Daniel Ek was now both a Wall Street CEO and one of the most powerful people in the music world. Criticism and controversy followed his every decision. The same applied internally, within a company that had once been dominated by engineers and small enough to fit in an apartment on Riddargatan.

As CEO, Daniel had been forced to evolve with his company. Conflicts came with the territory, particularly in a fast-growing, culturally impactful startup like the one he had co-founded. A number of sources interviewed for this book would describe how Daniel had a hard time knowing how to handle dustups among his lieutenants. Nearly a decade after Spotify started making big-name hires, many continued to recount how Daniel would let conflicts fester until the warring parties found their own solution. It was, still, a kind of natural selection in a corporate setting.

“The atmosphere is toxic at times. Daniel tends to give people overlapping responsibilities, then he lets them fight over who gets to do the work,” as one person would recall.

Employees further down the hierarchy would sometimes post scathing reviews of Spotify on the employment portal Glassdoor.

”No one is actually accountable for anything because virtually all decisions must take place though a bewildering process of group consensus, where people who are ignorant of the topic at hand somehow have just as much of a say as the experts,” one former employee at the New York office would post in November of 2019.

A handful of executives would depart Spotify following the IPO, among them Troy Carter, Jonathan Prince, Chief Marketing Officer Seth Farbman, and the long-serving communications director Angela Watts.

Yet many of the old guard remained at the company. Three of them—the chief R&D officer, Gustav Söderström; the head of premium, Alex Norström; and the HR boss, Katarina Berg—were present for the “open house” at the Stockholm headquarters that morning in August 2018. The host of the event was Dustee Jenkins, the company’s new head of communications. She had roots in Texas and had previously worked for the retail giant Target, and for a Republican congresswoman in Washington, DC.

The number of female executives at Spotify had grown over the past few years. The global head of markets, Cecilia Qvist, was in attendance, as was the managing director for the Nordics, Jenny Hermanson.

Their message to the journalists questioning the company’s constant losses was the same as it had always been: Spotify would keep burning cash in order to grow and retain its lead over Apple, Amazon, and Google’s recently launched service, YouTube Music.

Spotify’s free service had gone from berated to tolerated within the music industry, but relations were still tense. Touting Spotify’s ability to convert users from free to paid, Gustav Söderström repeated the company mantra: “The more you play, the more you pay.”

Then he did something that Daniel would normally avoid: Söderström mentioned several rivals by name.

“There’s a competitor in the US called Pandora, which has its own challenges. You can’t put YouTube Music in your pocket. As soon as the screen shuts down, it stops playing the music if you’re a free user. Apple Music has no free tier whatsoever.”

Three months after Spotify’s “open house,” Daniel Ek had his people set up a meeting that would kickstart the company’s push into podcasting.

It was late November, the week of Thanksgiving, and two American entrepreneurs had rearranged their holiday plans to fly to Stockholm. The Swedish CEO began by showing the founders of the Brooklyn-based podcasting startup Gimlet Media around the new headquarters.

The Gimlet founders, Matt Lieber and Alex Blumberg, were two middle-aged finance and radio veterans. They were welcomed by Daniel—dressed casually in sneakers, jeans, and a black t-shirt—and shown into his office for an open conversation about Gimlet’s business.

Lieber and Blumberg told him about the company, which had been founded in 2014 and had since built a catalogue of popular, expertly produced podcasts such as StartUp, ReplyAll, and The Nod. Gimlet had built a strong brand but was struggling with its finances and pressure from shareholders to drive up its valuation. The founders hoped that Daniel might be able to solve their problems.

Toward the end of the two hours, Daniel asked a question that caught his American counterparts off-guard.

“I just have one more question for you,” he said. “What would you do if I gave you a billion dollars?”

The Gimlet founders were stunned, as they would recall in an episode of StartUp. They struggled to come up with strong ideas on the spot. Their boldest proposition, put forth by Alex Blumberg, was to get into the news industry and build an organization like the New York Times, but for audio.

“I want you to start thinking at that scale,” Daniel said. “Because that’s the scale that we play at.”

A few months later, Daniel Ek announced the $230 million acquisition of Gimlet. It marked the beginning of an aggressive push into the US podcasting market, in which Spotify would spend a total of $600 million over the course of a year.

The strategy, laid out by Daniel in an open letter, was to make Spotify an “audio first” platform while competitors such as Apple and Amazon were expanding rapidly into video.

In 2019, Spotify would acquire the digital podcasting platform Anchor, the true-crime production studio Parcast, and, in February 2020, the ESPN veteran Bill Simmons’ lauded sports and entertainment network, The Ringer.

With the IPO fading from memory, Barry McCarthy’s time at Spotify had begun to wind down. Toward the end of his tenure, in late 2019, the normally outspoken CFO started making statements that were even more bold than usual.

Now in his mid-sixties, Barry used his final months to talk up Spotify’s underperforming share price and speak freely about his industry’s dynamics. He revealed that Spotify aimed to double its share of ad revenues from ten to twenty percent. He also praised a beta version of a forthcoming streaming service being built by ByteDance, the parent company of the wildly successful social network TikTok. In a surprising admission, he said he had seen screenshots of the app ahead of Spotify’s launch in India.

Barry presided over seven public quarterly reports as CFO. When the seasoned executive eventually stepped down in early 2020, Daniel Ek sounded fully comfortable on conference calls with Wall Street analysts. In fact, he sounded as calm and collected as the Netflix veteran who had schooled him.