Daniel Ek - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Daniel Ek

Title: Co-founder, Spotify

Position: 22    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Shaking up the online music sector

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• Shai Agassi
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• Ashley Highfield

Daniel Ek co-founded the Spotify on-demand music streaming service in 2006 with Martin Lorentzon but it has been over the past 12 months that it's really taken off.

The UK-based company's name is a combination of spot and identify and the 26-year-old Ek has certainly done that with a niche in the music industry.

The service is funded by advertising but the balance of the technology and ads seems to have been the right one while there is also a subscription-based service that does away with the ads.

Ek has a track record of online entrepreneurship having previously founded online advertising portal Advertigo, which he sold to Trade Doubler in 2004, the money from which he used to start Spotify. He's also been CTO for virtual teen community site, Stardoll.

One Agenda Setters panellist said: "Spotify works so well it's hard to fault its performance or business model - a true innovation of the age and potentially disruptive force in the media industry!"

Spotify is now also available via the Apple App Store as well as the Android mobile phone platform, further extending its potential to compete with iTunes.

Another judge speculated that Spotify is "likely to kill iTunes through the Trojan horse of the iPhone".

The company's mission statement certainly illustrates Ek's ambitions: "Our dream is to collect all the world's music and make it accessible to everyone."