Daniel Ek
Co-founder and CEO, Spotify
Making streaming better than piracy
Rating
76Impact score
Domains
StreamingLicensingDeveloper tooling
Scouting report
Co-founded Spotify in Stockholm in 2006 with an engineering goal that sounds trivial and was not: a track had to start playing faster than a pirated file on your own disk. The early peer-to-peer work solved it, and the licensing deals dragged the record industry into a model it had spent a decade litigating against. Spotify also gave the industry Backstage.
Curator’s note
Beat piracy on latency, which is a more honest explanation than the marketing.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Daniel Ek by Lukasz Kobus/European Commission, licensed CC BY 4.0.