Daniel Ek has spoken on what he wants for the future of Spotify saying that he wants more artists to make a living from music streaming.

At Spotify’s Investor Day earlier this month Spotify’s CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek talked about removing the “gatekeepers” from music. He told audiences that he “doesn’t believe in gatekeepers” as he discussed Spotify’s mission to make even more artists even more money with the future of Spotify.

The music industry gatekeepers that Ek is talking on are the one’s making the music industry profitable for just a top 1%. Ek want’s to quash this imbalance through Spotify and has been making good progress. He told analysts at the Investor Day that the “top tier” earners on Spotify rose 28% in two years from 16,000 artists to 22,000 at the end of 2017.

Ek followed up with an ambitious statement, saying: “My goal over the next few years is to increase that number of [top tier] creators to hundreds of thousands that have material success on our platform.” He says he wants Spotify to become “an ecosystem to support artists that’s accessible, that’s transparent and that’s democratic… that’s about promoting opportunity rather than picking winners and losers.”

Ek said that, especially as the biggest streaming service worldwide, their “need to nurture great talent is larger than ever before”. Continuing: “We believe that great music and artists in the future will come from specialised talent incubators like the labels of the past – [which] brings opportunities for the next Berry Gordy, Rick Rubin or Ahmet Ertegun.”

Spotify are certainly creating new opportunities for artists that may never have happened to them before the invention of music streaming. Their platform aids discovery and recommendations based on existing artists and popular playlists which put artists in front of sometimes millions of new listeners. Translating this discovery into profit is their next mission.