Daniel Ek earned extra from Spotify up to now 12 months than any artist has ever earned on the platform

Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek earned extra money from the platform up to now 12 months than every other artist ever has, stories royalties accountant Hunter Giles — and Ek’s closest executives aren’t far behind him, both. Taylor Swift, Drake, Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, and actually every other megastar you possibly can consider, haven’t been in a position to high the $345 million {dollars} Ek has made since final 12 months.

In his IC Publication, Giles breaks down the cashout values of Spotify executives’ shares, and equates these earnings to the variety of streams every exec would want to achieve to accrue the sum. Giles provides that he made the comparability utilizing the “beneficiant” worth of $0.003 per stream and “assumed 100 per cent management over the IP within the comps ([which is] by no means the case).”

Daniel Ek takes the highest spot with a cash-out share worth of $345 million up to now 12 months, which is the same as gaining 115 billion streams, hypothetically making him the number-one top-streamed artist of all time on the platform. As a comparability, Statista stories that Taylor Swift is the most-streamed actual 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 could hypothetically make him the ninth most-streamed artist of all time. Alex Norström, co-president at Spotify, is third within the rating with a share worth of $26.4 million, equal to eight.8 billion streams and inserting him at 185 within the most-streamed artists of all-time.

Giles’ comparability was impressed by an MBW article reporting on Lorentzon’s latest cash-out of $85.8M in shares and the latest information that songwriters are set to face $150 million in royalty cuts from Spotify in 2024.

Nonetheless, Giles says his evaluation is just not meant to vilify the executives at Spotify. “I personally don’t assume that Ek and the Gang are ‘good’ or ‘dangerous’ as individuals,” he says, “and the purpose of this isn’t to disgrace them…The dangerous actor right here imho [in my humble opinion] is similar as at all times: misaligned incentives that fail to appropriately share the wealth amongst stakeholders, AKA late-capitalism. These persons are simply doing a very good job of hitting the misaligned marks, and I don’t really feel it’s true or helpful to consider them as evil geniuses out to steal cash from artists.”

In different latest information, Ek confirmed in July {that a} new “deluxe” tier of Spotify is about to reach quickly, full with high-resolution audio high quality.

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