The Stockholm headquarter of music streaming company Spotify is the most important place in the music industry and the company's co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek is the most important player in the business, according to Forbes.

In a lavish report, the magazine explains that Daniel Ek has succeeded in creating a free, Facebook-enabled platform that could save the recording industry from piracy–and iTunes. It ranked the 28-year-old Swedish entrepreneur “The Most Important Man In Music”.

"More than New York or L.A. or Nashville, this rented office space along Stockholm’s Birger Jarlsgatan has become the most important place in music, with Ek now standing as the industry’s most important player.

"Superstar bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers—formed the year Ek was born—now trek to Sweden to kiss the ring; he sits shotgun in vintage cars with Neil Young (his iPhone boasts a picture of them cruising in a white 1959 Lincoln Continental); he texts breezily with Bono", it said.

The music service, launched in Sweden in 2008, has some 10 million users in Europe. After hammering out agreements with the four major record companies, Spotify launched in the United States in July with the ambitious goal of attracting 50 million US users within a year.

The main driver behind the US success was the integration with Facebook.

In September, Daniel Ek was the first guest Mark Zuckerberg introduced on stage during his keynote speech at the f8 developer conference, which introduced the network’s new media consumption features.

The web-based legal streaming service lets users access a library of some 15 million tracks and listen to them on a computer or mobile phone.

The service has had an impact on illegal downloading: Since 2009 the number of people who pirate music has dropped by 25 percent in Sweden, according to a report looking into online music consumption habits.

“The long-term trend is a sharp increase in legal streaming while we see a reduction in illegal file sharing and downloading,” Music Sweden’s CEO Elizabet Widlund told the blog Torrent Freak.

“When 800,000 Swedes are willing to pay for streaming music, there is clearly a market for more legal players in the digital music market. We encourage diversity of music services as it will provide better conditions for both those who create music and those who listen to it,” she added.