Former Spotify executive Will Page: The internet can’t scale intimacy

Will Page was working for the UK Government Economic Service in the income tax division, and moonlighting as a music writer for Straight No Chaser magazine when his life changed almost overnight. Pretty soon he was living in London, and helping to shape the new music business and the economics of music streaming.

Page eventually went on to work at Spotify where he was the chief economist. His book Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of Disruption was published in paperback this month.

Here he discusses his remarkable professional journey, “how music responds to suppression,” the need to “press pause on nostalgia,” what qualifies as “content,” and the idea that “the internet can scale just about everything but one thing it can’t scale is intimacy. [And jazz] is an intimate form.”