Who is Daniel Ek? Is he, as some have suggested, the most innovative business mind in Europe? Possibly, as someone suggests to me after I hear him speak, a mastermind of Doctor Evil proportions downplaying his plans for music industry domination? Or perhaps he’s just a kid who really likes music, more at home in track suit bottoms and floppy hair than his newly adopted black suits and shaved top.

Regardless of his legacy, tonight Daniel Ek is most certainly the center of attention and over a hundred pairs of eyes are focused on the Spotify CEO and founder as part of The Glasshouse Fireside Chat event. For any European who has been living under a rock, or anyone outside the EU unaware of its existence, Spotify is a downloadable music client with hundreds of thousands of tracks available to stream for free, store in playlists and listen to on demand. All that’s required on your part is to suffer the occasional commercial break. While Spotify tracks can not be stored permanently on your computer, transferred to a portable music device or streamed on anything not connected to the internet, premium users paying £10 per month can purchase the Spotify mobile application to listen to their Spotify playlists on the go – as well as listen to Spotify tracks on their phone, even when not connected to the internet. By providing a legal alternative to piracy (Daniel has all the major music labels on board), he has completely revolutionised the digital music industry and has already seen some staggering user numbers since their launch earlier this year.

Tonight he is interviewed by BBC business journalist and Heidrick and Struggles’ Principal Virginia Eastman. Although much of his advice to budding entrepreneurs is fairly standard – his top three suggestions being to work hard, spend wisely and seek good advice – he shares some interesting statistics about the company. Things are going well at the Spotify towers. One tidbit of user data Ek threw at the crowd was the fact that Spotify has 1,000,000 users in Sweden, Ek’s homeland, out of the total country’s population of 9 million. However although huge numbers of users take advantage of the freemium service, far less than 10% of them pay for Spotify premium – the primary revenue driving side of the service while the rest of the users are monitised through advertising. Ek also spoke about future plans to allow further sharing of Spotify tracks and playlists with friends, a feature that, while possible with the current version of Spotify is unwieldy and not intuitive for casual users.

Eastman takes Ek through questions sourced from Twitter, Spotify fans and the audience of The Glasshouse event – a powerful group of London technology professionals ranging from entrepreneurs to VCs. She finally challenges the guitar playing CEO to confess – was Spotify really just a way for him to live out his music fantasy of rock stardom. With a shrug, Ek concedes that may have been part of the incentive.

The 26 year old founded Spotify at the age of 23, back in 2006, with initial funds that included 8 million of his own money – money earned from his previous two highly successful online startups. An entrepreneur from the age of 14, it’s clear that business meetings, licensing negotiations and hard work have shaped him. There is little of the chipper attitude and throwaway platitudes that very young and very successful entrepreneurs seem to exude. Instead he is understated, polite and incredibly diplomatic, carefully sidestepping issues such as potential competition from iTunes, the future of the licensing deals and revenue projections. It is a focused Daniel Ek who answers questions with the evasiveness and party line of a politician while still managing to inspire both jealousy and innovation for the other entrepreneurs in the room.

Daniel Ek’s talk marked just another stellar event from The Glasshouse, whose guests in the past have included visitors from Google, Yahoo and eBay and it provided an interesting insight into one of the most influential companies in Europe. Spotify will continue to be one to watch, and for me even moreso now that I have seen the shrewd business mind and focused innovation of CEO and founder Daniel Ek.

- Meaghan Fitzgerald