He will be replaced by two co-CEOs after two decades at the helm
After nearly two decades at the helm, Spotify founder Daniel Ek is stepping down as CEO. On January 1, 2026, Ek is set to take on the executive chairman role of the streaming giant. Current Co-President and Chief Product & Technology Officer Gustav Söderström will pair with fellow current Co-President and Chief Business Officer Alex Norström to become co-CEOs of Spotify. Both Söderström and Norström will report directly to Ek, and serve on the company’s Board of Directors, pending approval.
“I always believed that Spotify could play an important role in revolutionizing listening around the world, and with more than 700 million users, we’ve truly charted a new course bringing creativity to every corner of the globe,” said Daniel Ek. “Over the last few years, I’ve turned over a large part of the day-to-day management and strategic direction of Spotify to Alex and Gustav – who have shaped the company from our earliest days and are now more than ready to guide our next phase. This change simply matches titles to how we already operate. In my role as Executive Chairman, I will focus on the long arc of the company and keep the Board and our co-CEOs deeply connected through my engagement.”
Woody Marshall, Lead Independent Director of Spotify’s Board, said, “The Board has been working closely with Daniel on the evolution of Spotify’s leadership structure for several years. We have tremendous confidence in Alex and Gustav as they step into these roles. They each have more than 15 years with the company and have been instrumental in driving our success and enabling Spotify to lead our industry. We are also thrilled that Daniel will be actively involved, giving Spotify both founder-led strategic stewardship and mentorship to the co-CEOs as the company continues to innovate and scale.”
The new co-CEOs said in a joint statement, “We’ve worked together a very long time and have seen Spotify through many different chapters. Nearly three years ago, when we stepped into our roles as co-Presidents, we charged our teams with relentlessly focusing on building the best and most valuable experience available anywhere and that ambition hasn’t changed. While we bring different experiences and perspectives to the CEO role, we both have a strong bias to action and can’t wait to get started knowing that we will have Daniel’s full partnership and ongoing support.”
The outcry over Spotify and “war tech” traces back not to a corporate investment by the streaming platform itself, but to a nearly €600 million (≈$700 million) financing round for the European defense-AI company Helsing that was led in June 2025 by Prima Materia—the private investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s then-CEO Daniel Ek, who also serves as Helsing’s chair. In public filings and coverage of the deal, Reuters and the Financial Times described Helsing as a Munich-based defense startup focused on AI software and now moving aggressively into building its own drones, aircraft and underwater systems; Prima Materia led the round alongside blue-chip venture firms and European defense stakeholders. The announcement set off a wave of anger among musicians and listeners who argued that the leader of the world’s largest music service should not be bankrolling battlefield technologies—even through a separate vehicle—because the optics tether artists’ royalties and fans’ subscription money to the development of lethal tools.
Helsing’s product roadmap made the controversy even more combustible. The company markets AI that fuses sensor data across “all domains,” with offerings ranging from the Altra reconnaissance-to-strike software stack to the HX-2 “software-defined” strike drone, designed for mass production, swarming, and resilience against electronic-warfare jamming; the firm has also unveiled long-endurance underwater surveillance drones and, most recently, a heavy, autonomous “Europa” combat drone concept. Although Helsing emphasizes that “a human stays in or on the loop for all critical decisions” and frames its mission as “protecting democracies,” the systems are expressly built to find, track, and destroy military targets, and the company says its tech is already supporting Ukraine. For artists and fans who oppose the normalization of autonomous weapons, the distinction between “defensive AI” and battlefield automation felt academic—especially given the pace at which drone warfare is scaling in Europe. (Helsing)
Recently, Spotify has been embattled in controversy surrounding an investment made By late June and July 2025, calls to cancel Spotify subscriptions and remove catalogs from the service had begun to snowball across independent music communities. Deerhoof publicly said it would quit Spotify over Ek’s “AI battle tech” ties; Xiu Xiu and other avant-garde and indie acts followed, with the Los Angeles Times reporting that some artists were urging fans to abandon the platform entirely. Rolling Stone and regional outlets tracked a growing list of departures into September, as the story spread beyond niche forums and tech blogs. The Guardian highlighted the stakes when Massive Attack—a band with longstanding political commitments—announced the removal of its music from Spotify, calling the situation a “moral and ethical burden” for artists whose work was, in their view, helping fund lethal technologies.
It is important to note that the $700 million did not come from Spotify’s corporate treasury. It was a Prima Materia bet championed by Ek in his capacity as a tech investor—and consistent with his growing focus on building European “supercompanies.” Still, several mainstream tech and business reports noted how little that distinction mattered in practice. When the public face of Spotify chairs a defense unicorn ramping up AI-enabled drones, the reputational blowback lands on the service itself, where the artists’ catalogs live and where subscribers vote with their wallets.
In the months since the funding round, the boycott evolved from a symbolic gesture into a coordinated campaign in some scenes: local musician unions and collectives organized open pledges to leave the platform; culture and tech magazines framed the rift as a broader reckoning over AI ethics in music; and human-rights trackers aggregated reports of the protest and the demands behind it. Mainstream acts like Massive Attack, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and more have removed their music from the streaming service. While departures from major stars remain fairly limited, the episode compounded long-standing grievances about streaming economics (tiny per-stream payouts, shifting royalty formulas), giving artists a tangible flashpoint that connected money, ethics, and identity. Whether or not Spotify itself ever invests a cent in defense, Ek’s $700 million Helsing bet has made the company a proxy battlefield for arguments about who profits from music in the AI age—and what those profits ultimately build.
For its part, Helsing has kept advancing its product line and message: AI “to protect democracies,” human-in-the-loop targeting, and a push for European technological sovereignty. That framing—common across the defense-tech sector—has not quelled critics who reject the premise that music money and military AI can be ethically separated just because the investment runs through a private fund rather than corporate books. In practice, fans see a single figure at the top of Spotify making a monumental wager on militarized autonomy, and artists see leverage: catalogs, community, and the power to withhold both. Whether this coalesces into broader platform flight or recedes as news cycles turn will hinge on two variables: the pace and visibility of Helsing’s battlefield deployments—and how Spotify’s new leadership navigates a brand identity now entangled with the politics of AI and war.
Prima Materia led Helsing’s €600 million round on June 16–17, 2025; artist removals and boycott calls accelerated from late June through September 2025; and on September 30, 2025, Spotify announced that Ek will become executive chair on January 1, 2026, with two co-CEOs taking over operations. Together, those events crystallized a narrative many artists now repeat: a platform long criticized for thin royalties is, through its most powerful figure, helping to bankroll AI systems designed for drones and other military platforms—an association they refuse to normalize.
Spotify are not strangers to controversy, though. The streaming service boasts over 700 million subscribers worldwide, has long been subject backlash over artist royalties. Streaming turned listening into a monthly utility bill, and royalty accounting followed. On Spotify, there is no fixed “per-stream rate.” Instead, all money collected from subscriptions and ads goes into a pool; each track’s share of total plays in a country and tier determines how much that track’s rightsholder gets. Spotify calls this streamshare (a pro-rata model), and it’s the same basic math most big DSPs use. The company emphasizes this to counter the “per-stream” myth, but artists experience the result as tiny payouts per play.
The Model:
- Spotify gathers net revenue (after taxes, payment fees, etc.) by market and tier (Premium vs. free/ad-supported).
- It pays rightsholders (labels/distributors for recordings; publishers/PROs for songs) their slice based on each track’s share of total streams that month.
- Artists are paid through those rightsholders, according to their deals. In other words: Spotify pays rightsholders, not artists directly (unless the artist is their own label/distributor).
Spotify reports paying over $10 billion to music rightsholders in 2024 alone, but those billions are split across an ocean of tracks and intermediaries, which is why most individual artists feel very little of it. Because the pro-rata pot is opaque and fluctuates by country and tier, musicians reduce it to an effective per-stream estimate simply to budget. Industry trackers and distributors commonly peg Spotify’s effective rate around $0.002–$0.005 per stream (varies by audience mix and deal). That’s not official, but it reflects what many rightsholders actually receive, on average, before label/distributor splits.
Use these as ballpark figures for recording royalties only (publishing is separate and smaller, and artist splits vary by contract):
- 1,000 streams → often $2–$5 gross. Note: since 2024, Spotify requires a track to hit ~1,000 streams in the prior 12 months before it generates any recording royalties, which effectively zeros-out long-tail drips below that line.
- 100,000 streams → roughly $200–$500 gross.
- 1,000,000 streams → roughly $2,000–$5,000 gross. (A commonly cited midpoint is ~$3,500.)
- 10,000,000 streams → roughly $20,000–$50,000 gross.
Those are rightsholder totals; the artist’s share depends on their deal. A DIY artist on a flat-fee distributor might keep nearly all of the recording royalty; a signed artist on a traditional label deal might see a fraction after recoupment. This is the main reason many working musicians describe Spotify income as meager despite “big-looking” stream counts.
To combat fraud, spam, and “noise” uploads, Spotify introduced in 2024 a 1,000-streams-per-year eligibility threshold for recordings to earn royalties, and tougher treatment of “non-music” noise tracks and penalties for fraud. Spotify and trade press framed this as redirecting tens of millions of dollars from ultra-micro payouts (pennies fragmented across billions of sub-1,000-stream tracks) back to tracks above the threshold. Critics argue it further starves emerging artists. Meanwhile, the scale problem keeps growing: Spotify has reported removing tens of millions of spam tracks as AI-driven uploads surge—another pressure point that dilutes earnings on a per-play basis in the pro-rata pool.
Spotify’s own data tries to show that share can add up: in 2024, an artist with one out of every million streams on the service generated over $10,000 on average (to their recording + publishing rightsholders combined). That sounds encouraging—until you realize how steep the pyramid is, and how many artists sit far below that share of total listening.
With hundreds of billions of annual plays across a ~100M+ track catalog, each individual stream is worth very little in a pro-rata pool. Premium plays in high-revenue countries are worth more than ad-supported or lower-ARPU regions, so two artists with the same stream count can see different payouts. Labels, distributors, managers, and recoupment reduce what reaches the artist’s bank account—often drastically (Spotify pays rightsholders, not artists). The 1,000-stream rule eliminates the smallest trickle of income many hobbyist and early-stage artists once saw.
How much do artists make?
- 1k streams → $2-$5
- 10K streams → $20–$50
- 50K streams → $100–$250
- 100K streams → $200–$500
- 250K streams → $500–$1,250
- 500K streams → $1,000–$2,500
- 1M streams → $2,000–$5,000
- 5M streams → $10,000–$25,000
- 10M streams → $20,000–$50,000
From an individual artist’s vantage point—especially without a large, Premium-heavy audience—the answer is often yes. The pro-rata design and the sheer scale of listening make each stream worth a fraction of a cent, and 2024’s threshold change removed micro-royalties entirely below 1,000 annual streams per track. Spotify counters that total payouts are at record highs and still growing, but distribution remains extremely top-heavy. Both can be true at once.