Meet the Nominee of the Day (6), Spotify, Sweden

Company Bio:

Spotify has created a lightweight software application that users can simply download, log in and thereby enable on demand streaming of music. Spotify is a proprietary peer-to-peer music streaming service that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay.Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created playlists as well as by direct searches. The program/service in its free version is only available in parts of western Europe during the ongoing beta program although the subscription model should be available in almost all countries. Spotify recently also launched into the iPhone, Android mobile platforms

Read background information on Spotify

Country:

Sweden

Web:

http://www.spotify.com

Founders:

Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon

Meet Daniel Ek

Daniel is a 26 year old technologist who started his first company 1997 at the age of 14. Currently he is the CEO and founder of Spotify, a legal music service that helps people discover, browse and play music.

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. The underlying business has changed from being about ownership to an access model. Spotify facilitates that by offering a service in the cloud.

Prior to Spotify, Daniel was the initial CTO of Stardoll, the fashion & entertainment community for tweens. He was also the CEO of µTorrent, the worlds most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads. Daniel has also founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler, as well as been a part of the nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay).

Snapshot:

Jury Motivation:

“Yesss! Success. Works. People now are willing to pay for the survival of music – when getting it served” — Ann Westfelt

Meet Ann Westfelt and the rest of the jury here

Online Coverage:

Spotify has been very much the pride of Scandinavia and is slowly turning into pride of Europe. Daniel Ek wants to “build a SAP kind of European company”

Tech Crunch Interview in London by Daniel Ek

Tech Crunch reports possible Cap Table of Spotify

Guardian’s Coverage

Paid Content’s report

Spotify needs no introduction, and we are very happy that they are going to be at SIME Awards this year. Looking forward to interesting updates from them.

Good luck guys, stay cool.