Daniel Ek has made more money from Spotify in a year than Taylor Swift has, like, ever

It’s been reported that, in the last 12 months, Spotify founder Daniel Ek he has earned more from the platform than any artist has ever.

Drake, Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, even Taylor Swift can’t beat the $345 million that Ek has made in the last year. Essentially, it feel like every musician on Planet Earth (or at least those that are on Spotify) is working for him.

This startling statistic has been revealed by royalties accountant Hunter Giles in his IC Newsletter. In it, he calculates the cashout value of the shares the top executives at Spotify own and calculate how many streams it would take for a musician to accumulate that wealth in a year.

Ek comes out on top with a figure it would take 115 billion streams to make. To put that into context, Taylor Swift is the top streamed artist on the platform with a total of 76 billion to date in April 2024.

Second to Ek is another Spotify exec, Martin Lorentzon, whose $166.8 million worth of shares is equal to 55.6 billion streams. This would make him the ninth most streamed artist on all time.

It comes after Spotify announced record profits of some €3.81billion (£3.2billion) in the second quarter of 2024, which came after a 17% cut to its workforce at the end of 2023 and the news in April that it had decided to ‘de-monetise’ all songs that have had less than a thousand streams, a decision that has already affected thousands of struggling musicians.

However, Giles is careful to point out that his analysis is not in itself intended to vilify Spotify executives. “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.”

In other words, that’s capitalism, folks!

Those of us with memories that go back to the last century may recall that there was a time when it was argued that the Internet was somehow going to ‘liberate’ artists from those nasty, greedy record companies. Just saying...