Daniel Ek is the 27 years old serial entrepreneur behind spotify, a legal music service he founded with Martin Lorentzon that helps people discover, browse and play music.. He started his first company at the young age of 14 in 1997 and soon joined the IT Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg at age of 15.
Prior to Spotify Daniel founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler and has been a part of the Nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay) and Evertigo. Daniel's previous jobs include CTO at Jajja Communications, CTO at Stardoll and CEO of µTorrent, the worlds most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads.
Daniel signed a contract on behalf of Spotify with 7digital music service in 2009, allowing Spotify users to purchase tracks.
Daniel also stated that Spotify was founded as a reaction to the decline of the music industry. “People listen to more music than ever, from a bigger diversity of artists he said”. The underlying business has changed from being about ownership to an access model. Spotify facilitates that by offering a service in the cloud.
In his interview with telegraph he said “"The music industry is currently worth $17bn (£10.8bn); it's going to be $40bn or $50bn soon. There will only be four or five players left in a few years," he says. "If that's the case, we will end up with a company worth tens of billions."
Currently over seven million people have signed up to the website, 250,000 have signed up to the premium service, which costs £9.99 a month in the UK and currently the service make tons of millions of euros each year from advertisers.
