'The music industry took a beating but it's getting back on its feet' - Spotify's director of artist services on digital disruption

We're a part of driving it but we are part of catering for a disruption that was taking part before Spotify. We gave them the ability to play any music they wanted, on demand, for free. It wasn't really us coming in and changing it from the beginning. It was us catering to how people wanted to listen to music. However, now that we have millions of people using Spotify, we are in an unbelievable position to take that forward and start to change things and advance that. Now it's not just about the stuff that you might have been exposed to within your immediate peer group, or radio. Now, all of a sudden with one click you can find a new band or a new genre or something entirely different. People wanted more music and ways to consume it and now we are advancing that. It's fundamentally a really awesome thing.

How can your audience deepen their music listening?

The fundamentally amazing thing about Spotify is, to try a band, the friction is so much lower. I can tell you about a band, but to go and listen to that band in the past you may have gone to a store or had to pay 99 cents to download their song. Now you can listen to it and send it to a friend. If it's easier to try something, you are far more likely to fall in love with it. With this, people click through, they try and experiment and when people do that, you have a much better chance of getting music that people might love to their ears for the first time. That's where we all start with these bands.

And it costs them nothing but their own time.

Absolutely, there is some reward in that exploration. If you click on something you don't like, that's not the end of the world. Obviously you haven't paid any more if you're a premium subscriber or if you're free. You feel like you have given something a go. I was chatting to someone the other day about classical music and they were talking about Spotify. I felt there were lots of people on Spotify who have stumbled across classical music. For example, Shutter Island is a film with an amazing classical soundtrack. How many people were listening to classical music for the first time from that? Then they can click on our 'Related Artists' and check out more. The opportunity to stumble and discover or actively go after it, it's like has never been seen before and that is hugely promising.

How much of a disruptive influence has music streaming and brands like Spotify had on media and broadcasting?

The way that I see this is less about picking a particular action instead of another but catering for behaviours. Some people want to watch a music TV show, some people love the sync at the end of a Girls episode and other people want to get down into the weeds for two hours and discover the latest hip east London band. It's more about as humans we want different ways to do things. In the past we were constrained by the physical format and now we are in this digital world where we are not constrained by that. It doesn't have to be be way or the other, it's just this buffet of choice and that applied across TV and the internet, It's giving people the opportunity to make these choices and that is hugely disruptive.

How has the personal listening experience evolved?

We've seen various shifts from LPs to albums and singles. When the digital download came along there was the buzzword 'unbundling' the album and you could take the tricks you wanted. With Spotify we have introduced a new paradigm with the playlist. With that, you are unconfined. You can put running tracks together or you can just keep adding tracks which has allowed people to take more control and be more free with it. That encourages exploring. Fundamentally that's what I come back to. One company shut down the last ever cassette factory because no one was listening to cassettes any more. The week later someone opened the first ever cassette factory in 30 years. The interesting thing there, and we see it with vinyl, is we all want to sound the death knell of a certain type of listening and yet, there's always going to be demand for different ways, be that the album or the single or the playlist, vinyl or cassette, and that really emphasises that point of choice.

How has mobile impacted that change?

Before, you might have gone to a pub or a bar and they might have had a jukebox with a 1,000 tracks and everyone was really envious of that. Now we have that in our pocket. Everyone potentially remembers how excited they were when they got their first 8gb iPod. Now we're in a position where we can listen to any track, on demand, on mobile and the web. We still have that really nice luxury of being able to take it offline when getting on a flight. Mobile is absolutely huge and again, the great thing from a music point of view is what we want is more people listening to music. We love it and if you can do that on a plane, that's just an incredible opportunity for everyone,

What has it meant for the music industry?

In a world where you have so many different choices of what your eyes and ears and senses could be doing from video games to TV to online blogs, what is important about music is that it has always been the number one place in a lot of people's hearts. It's really about getting on par with a lot of those and figure out how we make it portable? How do we make it cost effective and free and fun? And so for the music industry it's really about being able to compete with that attention span again. People are listening to more music than they ever have before. Over the last 10 years we have seen white earbuds take over the tubes and subways and buses and planes and what that means is, the more money we can generate for the industry, the more artists can get paid and the more music can be made. That's just a huge silver lining in this internet age where the music took a beating but it's getting back on its feet and we're going to see an incredible explosion in both the economic and the art of the industry.

From a brand perspective, what has Spotify become as an advertising platform?

We have millions of free users that we subsidise through advertising and that allows us to create these connections for brands around music. You can upgrade and get rid of the ads but also bring brands into that musical sphere where there is all of that emotion and all of that love for their artist and if they make a great advert or a great connection, they can benefit from that.