99/264 LETTER FROM DANIEL EK Our Path—A Note from Daniel Ek, Co­Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman From the age of four, my life was about music and technology—never one without the other. Over time, I realized that by combining my two passions, I could create a new paradigm, one that helped fans and the creative community—singers, songwriters, bands, everyone in the creative process —chart a new course for an entire industry. Spotify is the manifestation of those dreams. Music was too important to me to let piracy take down the industry. There had to be a way to give people access to the music they loved while allowing creators to get paid for their work, and to expand their creativity. So I built a company based on a core set of values: innovation, passion, collaboration, transparency, and fairness. These values drive how we work with the creative community and how we treat our users. They’re why we’re committed to a diverse workforce in an open, trusting company culture. Today, Spotify is one of the largest drivers of global music revenue. We’ve helped restore a rapidly shrinking industry to growth, and connected over a million artists with hundreds of millions of fans. People constantly tell me how music has helped them through life’s biggest moments—birth and death, euphoria and heartbreak. At Spotify, we want to enrich, strengthen, and extend those moments and connections. So while some companies rely entirely on data, we take a different approach. We start with human creativity, augment it with our expertise and understanding, and then leverage with the efficiency of algorithms. Music has just been the beginning. We’re an audio first platform—as a top provider of podcasts, we’re also connecting audiences to the conversations that we think will shape the future. And we have even bigger aspirations. We envision a cultural platform where professional creators can break free of their medium’s constraints and where everyone can enjoy an immersive artistic experience that enables us to empathize with each other and to feel part of a greater whole. But to realize this vision, professional creators must be able to earn a fair living doing what they love, where monetization is at the core of a creative proposition and not an afterthought. We care deeply about our creators and our users and we believe Spotify is a win­win for both. That’s our mission—to unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. Everyone who partners with us—employees, users, the creative community, brands, investors—should understand what our mission means to us, how we make decisions, and why. We know that if we’re going to succeed as a company and as an industry, we have to think, build, plan, and imagine for the long­term. To build a better world by unlocking human creativity, we are committed to creating a better experience for users—and to enabling more creators to live off their work. We firmly believe that in the long run, these priorities will provide greater returns to all of our stakeholders. That’s because the future is markedly different from the past. The old model favored certain gatekeepers. Artists had to be signed to a label. They needed access to a recording studio, and they had to be played on terrestrial radio to achieve success. Today, artists can produce and release their own music. Labels, studios, and radio still matter, but in a cluttered landscape, artists’ biggest challenge is navigating this complexity to get heard. We believe Spotify empowers them to break through. 92