Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music
forbes.com
forbes.com
This is the crux of why this whole thing ultimately won't work, in my humble opinion. The folks in charge of licensing Ek his product still care very much about money, and as long as he has to license his product from them they are going to charge a completely unsustainable rate.
Rather than focusing on creating a platform for developers to make cool applications with Spotify, Ek should be focusing on creating a platform for musicians to get their businesses together without record labels.