I want to devote today’s letter to Spotify. You know, the music streaming service. Here is a chart: CEO Daniel Ek has now made more money than any musician in history. He has a net worth of $7.2 billion, and Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Bruce Springsteen put...
For months, one question has been plaguing pop fans: why is Spotify playing me the same songs over and over again? Every other week, a post goes viral on X asking why Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!, or Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, or Billie Eilish’s Birds of a...
We’re gonna go ahead and guess that Daniel Ek had a Holiday to remember. Spotify‘s Swedish co-founder and CEO cashed out USD $27.72 million in company shares on December 23 – a handsome boost to anyone’s late-festive-gift budget. Indeed, across the course of December,...
I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few...
Research firm Luminate has published its mid-year report for 2024, with a raft of stats exploring the continued growth of the recorded music market. The headline stat: 2.29 trillion. That’s how many on-demand audio streams there were globally in the first six months...
It’s been some week for Daniel Ek. Yesterday (April 23), Spotify‘s share price jumped up by over 11% following the company’s Q1 results announcement, in which it confirmed its biggest-ever quarterly operating profit. That share price rise gave Spotify a market...
