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I wanted to play in a band, and I wanted to do music for a living, and that's what I dedicated my life to.

I wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.

I was always taught as a kid that if there's anything you want in life, you've got to work towards it. I guess that sort of stayed with me, really. But also, for me, from the time I was, like, 10 years old, all I ever wanted to do was be in a band and make music.

I was in a band at school, and almost from the day we started, I started writing songs, just because that seemed what you did.

I had two passions growing up - one was music, one was technology. I tried to play in a band for a while, but I was never talented enough to make it. And I started companies. One day came along and I decided to combine the two - and there was Spotify.

The way I like to think about it is, even though I started music early - I started in classical music - it wasn't until I discovered jazz that I really fell in love with music and realized this was what I wanted to do for a living.

I'm doing exactly what I always wanted to do, and I still like what I can do musically.

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.