Daniel Ek is a serial entrepreneur from Sweden. He taught himself how to code, which allowed him to start his own web development company and rake in thousands of dollars at 14. After quitting college, he started Advertigo, an online marketing company, which was acquired by Swedish company TradeDoubler. In 2006, he co-founded the music site Spotify. Ek, now 29 and CEO, is on track to raise $220 million from prominent investors, raising Spotify’s value to $4 billion. What interests me most about Ek is not his young age or the money he has earned, but that he has created a strong rival for iTunes. Spotify is a legal music service that allows users to search and stream music on demand to their mobile devices for $5 or $10 a month. Every time a track is played on the site, artists and their labels are paid a royalty. However, there’s no need to have an Apple device or to download and pay per song/album as iTunes requires. Today, Spotify is highly popular in Europe and is growing in the U.S. It now has over 3 million subscribers worldwide. Essentially, Ek has found success by reshaping the online music service industry to make it easier for people to listen to music and pay for it, rather than to steal it.
Web Resources:
http://www.inc.com/30under30/burt-helm/daniel-ek-founder-of-spotify.html