The CEO-founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek, and founder of At Night Management (Avicii’s manager), Ash Pournouri, are hosting the inaugural Symposium Stockholm June 8th through the 13th. The week long Symposium Stockholm will be held during the technology and music based Brilliant Minds Conference on June 11th and 12th. Symposium Stockholm is a South By Southwest like week that includes the following events: Polar Talks, Polar Music Prize, Scandinavian Music Summit, Denniz Pop Awards, Summerburst Festival and AVICII Fest where the artist is expected to preview his upcoming album.
Stockholm has quickly become the technology capital of Europe with over 22,000 startups and home to billion dollar companies like Spotify, Ericsson, King (Candy Crush makers), Skype, H&M, and Ikea. Ek and Pournouri saw the need to hold a week long conference that fuses together music and technology like SXSW in the States. Ek feels that Sweden is the model for technology and content consumption.
“I wanted to cast an eye on how those consumption behaviors can lead to creativity thriving,” Ek says. “A lot of that dialogue seems to be happening in the U.S., but if you’re a technology executive and you want to see how rapidly something can get adopted, look to Sweden, which has the third-highest per capita usage of new technologies.”
“The reception [in Sweden] has been great, and everyone feels it’s about time someone did something like this,” says Pournouri. “I don’t think it’s going to come from politicians because they’re not incentivized in the long run for focusing on the politics, we’re focused on all issues and problems. I just felt this responsibility was with us: if we don’t do it who will?”
