Will Page

Will Page is the Director of Economics at Spotify, a Swedish based digital music service. To date, Spotify has launched in 20 countries around the world and recently announced that it has reached 24 million active users and over 6 million paying subscribers.

For six years he was the Chief Economist at the PRS for Music, a non-profit collection society representing writers, composers and music publishers in the UK.

Page graduated with an MSc in Economics at the University of Edinburgh in 2002. His Masters thesis ‘Germany's Mezzogiorno Revisited’ looked at the problems facing East Germany ten years after German Reunification. The paper was published by Deutsche Bank in 2003, and cited in 2005 by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.

He previously worked for the UK Government Economic Service at the Scottish Executive working for the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser and Department of Finance. He contributed to the Scottish Executive Economic Discussion Paper Series with a publication on ‘Infrastructure Investment & Economic Growth’.

During this period, he established a moonlighting career in music, writing for the award winning music publication Straight No Chaser (magazine), interviewing the BBC Awards for world music 2004 winner Rokia Traore, and working with the Brazilian composer Eumir Deodato on the North Sea Jazz Festival performances in 2003 and 2008.

His most notable contribution to the music industry is an annual report titled ‘Adding up the UK Music Industry’. Now in its second year, the report shows how much the UK music industry is worth and, more importantly, how it all hangs together. The paper has received extensive press coverage in The Guardian, The Times and Financial Times.

Page contributed to the campaign to save the new music radio station BBC 6 Music in May 2010. He presented two facts to the debate: (i) 6 Music is playing more unique songs and (ii) paying royalties to more unique songwriters than any other radio station.

His most cited collaboration was with Eric Garland of BigChampagne titled ‘In Rainbows, On Torrents’ asked whether the Radiohead legal free offering could compete with illegal free downloads. He also challenged the popular Long Tail theory, showing that the demand for digital music instead followed a log normal distribution.