The Spotify play: how CEO and founder Daniel Ek beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the race for audio dominance Edition: First Diversion Books edition

Prologue -- A secret idea -- The engineers -- Rågsved -- Party like it's 1999 -- Better than piracy -- "Wealth-type money" -- All music for free -- Bridge to America -- "Schmuck insurance" -- Sean & Zuck -- "Winter is coming" -- Spotify TV -- Apple buys Beats -- Death Valley -- From Nashville to Brooklyn -- Big data -- Brilliant Sweden -- The streaming wars -- Wall Street -- The house that Daniel built.;2011. In the midst of the Apple-Android tech war and a music label crusade against piracy and illegal downloading, Spotify redrew the battle lines, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, and got the hardline executives at Universal, Sony, and Warner to sign with its "free-mium" platform. Carlsson and Leijonhufvud covered the company from its inception, and here they draw upon hundreds of interviews, previously untapped sources, and in-depth reporting to capture the David vs. Goliath story of a disruptive innovator who played the industry giants in a quest to revolutionize the consumption [...]of sound, building today's largest online source of audio, with more than 50 million songs, one million-plus podcasts, and over 300 million users. -- adapted from back cover