Daniel Ek earned more from Spotify in the past 12 months than any artist has ever earned on the platformSpotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek earned more money from the platform in the past 12 months than any other artist ever has, reports royalties accountant Hunter Giles — and Ek’s closest executives aren’t far behind him, either. Taylor Swift, Drake, Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, and literally any other megastar you can think of, haven’t been able to top the $345 million dollars Ek has roughly made since last year.

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In his IC Newsletter, Giles breaks down the cashout values of Spotify executives’ shares, and equates those earnings to the number of streams each exec would need to gain to accrue the sum. Giles adds that he made the comparison using the “generous” value of $0.003 per stream and “assumed 100 per cent control over the IP in the comps ([which is] never the case).”
Daniel Ek takes the top spot, cashing out a total of $345 million in shares since July 2023, which is equal to gaining 115 billion streams, hypothetically making him the number-one top-streamed artist of all time on the platform. As a comparison, Statista reports that Taylor Swift is the most-streamed real artist on Spotify, with 76 billion all-time streams as of April 2024.
Second place to Ek is Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of Spotify, whose shares are valued at $166.8 million — equal to 55.6 billion streams. This would hypothetically make him the ninth most-streamed artist of all time. Alex Norström, co-president at Spotify, is third in the ranking with a share value of $26.4 million, equal to 8.8 billion streams and placing him at 185 in the most-streamed artists of all-time.
Giles’ comparison was inspired by an MBW article reporting on Lorentzon’s recent cash-out of $85.8M in shares and the recent news that songwriters are set to face $150 million in royalty cuts from Spotify in 2024.
However, Giles says his analysis is not intended to vilify or shame the executives at Spotify. “I personally don’t think that Ek and the Gang are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as people,” he says, “and the point of this isn’t to shame them…The bad actor here imho [in my humble opinion] is the same as always: misaligned incentives that fail to appropriately share the wealth amongst stakeholders, AKA late-capitalism. These people are just doing a good job of hitting the misaligned marks, and I don’t feel it’s true or useful to think of them as evil geniuses out to steal money from artists.”
Daniel Ek hasn’t taken home a regular salary since 2017, according to Spotify’s filings, and Fortune reckons he was “probably one of the worst-paid major tech CEOs last year” but did receive $ 1.4 million in “other compensation.”
In other recent news, Ek confirmed in July that a new “deluxe” tier of Spotify is set to arrive soon, complete with high-resolution audio quality.
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