In May 2006, Stockholm was the unlikely front line in the fight for the future of the music industry. The city’s police raided Swedish-owned file-sharing site The Pirate Bay and seized its web servers, temporarily shutting down its global business. Across town, a young entrepreneur named Daniel Ek was about to launch Spotify.
It was a turning point, says Mattias Tengblad, a former musician who had just taken over as commercial director at Universal Music in Sweden. “The business was going down the drain. We had politicians defending young people for using The Pirate Bay, and it was felt the industry was finished in its current form,” he says. “But
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