Spotify’s CEO telling labels what to do? That will raise a few hackles, but to be clear, Daniel Ek was only responding to a direct question (on the ‘Invest Like The Best’ podcast) about what he’d do if he was suddenly made CEO of the world’s largest record label.
“I think the smartest labels already do a lot of what I will say. But I think the model has been a controlled environment and it’s been all about controlling how their IP is being used and monetised and having as much control as possible around that,” said Ek.
But… “The best labels have realised that they are in service of the creator. Their job is almost to try to enable the creator to do as much of what’s authentic to the creator to try to do. The smartest ones would be very service centred and try to create more enablement rather than sort of more control. So if I ran one of them, I would probably try to take that to an extreme somewhere and try to see how much could we improve.”