6 Tales From ‘Spotify Unknown’ Of Near Misses, Aborted Acquisitions and Steve Jobs’ Heavy Breathing

T'Spotify Untold' offers a behind-the-scenes "character-driven story of Spotify’s rise from a tiny start-up to the biggest music streaming company in the world,” and the new book is filled with some juicy revelations.

The book by Swedish journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud, tech reporters for Stockholm-based Di Digital is currently only available in Swedish.

6 Top Tales From 'Spotify Untold'

• A paranoid Daniel Ek became convinced that then Apple CEO Steve Jobs was calling him and without a word, just breathing heavily
• Apple and Steve Jobs actively worked to stop Spotify from launching in the US
• Spotify was in serious talks to buy TIDAL
• Talks to acquire Soundcloud fell apart even closer to an acquisition
• Microsoft, Google and Tencent all offered to acquire Spotify
• Spotify worked for years to launch a video streaming service more like Hulu than Netflix, but eventually gave up when they were unable to negotiate deals for enough content to compete. – H/T Variety

From The Publisher

"On a hot summer’s evening in 2011, Daniel Ek, the whiz kid CEO of Spotify, is lavishly celebrating the hard-won US launch of his company in the hills of Palo Alto, after more than a year of delays. Only fifteen minutes away lies the modest brick house that belongs to Steve Jobs, who has worked hard to stop this moment from ever happening.

Only six months earlier, the tech war between Apple’s iPhone and Android was raging, and Steve Jobs saw downloaded music—kept within his software— as key to his ‘holy war’ against Google. But now, the battle lines have been redrawn. A new challenger, with humble origins as a Swedish start-up, has successfully launched in the US, using a different tactic. Spotify had catapulted to the top of the music streaming industry, using the threat of piracy and illegal downloading to get the notoriously hard-line record labels to sign with them. But if Daniel Ek thought that the fight was won that summer’s night, he would soon learn that a single battle doesn’t win a war.

In the vein of Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber and Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple, investigative tech journalists Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud deliver a behind-the-scenes exposé of how the self-made prodigy Daniel Ek and his financial partner Martin Lorentzon would bet everything on the power of an idea, creating Sweden’s hottest start-up. Based on over 70 interviews, along with previously untapped sources, SPOTIFY UNTOLD is a David vs Goliath story about how strong convictions, unrelenting willpower and big dreams can help small players take on tech titans."

About The Authors

Sven Carlsson (b. 1986) is a tech reporter at the Swedish business publication Dagens Industri, where he covers companies such as Spotify and Uber. He has a master’s from Columbia School of Journalism and previously worked at Svenska Dagbladet, AFP and Swedish Public Radio.

Jonas Leijonhufvud (b . 1974) has covered business since 1998. He interviewed Jeff Bezos in 2000 and founder Martin Lorentzon in 2008, when Spotify had just launched. He has a degree in Media Arts from University of Arizona and is Sven's colleague at Dagens Industri.