Spotify's CEO explains how the music powerhouse got traction early on

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Spotify has gone from a scrappy Swedish startup to the market leader in streaming music, and CEO Daniel Ek says three key decisions helped it get there.

In a Quora question-and-answer session, Ek pointed to these three early decisions:

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1. Spotify chose a narrow market that it knew how to serve: Sweden. "Had we started with the US there's no way we would still be around. The US market just wasn't ready," Ek writes.
2. Spotify spent an "insane amount of time" focusing on latency, eliminating buffering. "Obsessing over small details can sometimes make all the difference," he writes.
3. Spotify bucked the trend in Sweden to focus on working "with" the music industry instead of against it. "The general thinking was to just do whatever you wanted with music and then ask for forgiveness later," he explains. Spotify hashed things out with the major labels first.

Spotify is now closing in on 30 million paying subscribers, according to FT.