Music

Spotify founder Daniel Ek has announced that he will be stepping down from the role of CEO.

Ek founded the streaming service two decades ago and has been CEO since. He announced today (Tuesday September 30) that he will be transitioning to an executive chairman role for the company on January 1, 2026.

Taking his place as co-CEOs will be Spotify co-presidents Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström. The former currently serves as the company’s chief business officer, while Söderström leads Spotify’s product and technology unit.

“As Executive Chairman, I will spend more of my time on the long arc: strategy, capital allocation, regulatory efforts, and the calls that will shape the next decade for Spotify,” Ek said in his statement. “Gustav and Alex will continue to report to me, and we will work closely together with our Board of Directors.”

He added that the move has been made to allow him to shift his focus towards other businesses.

“A personal note on what’s next for me. I am often asked, ‘How do we build more Spotifys out of Europe?’ That’s why several years ago, I announced my intention to help create more of these supercompanies — companies that are developing new technologies to tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time,” he added.

An update from me 👇 pic.twitter.com/xc0w3BWWAO

— Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) September 30, 2025

One of the businesses outside of Spotify that Ek is involved in is his investment company, Prima Materia. Over the summer, the brand led a €600million (£524million) investment into Helsing – a Munich-based company creating drones and artificial intelligence for military operations.

The move led to a number of high profile artists to pull their music from Spotify, including King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, in a bid to “put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better”.

Those joining them in the boycott was Xiu Xiu, who shared plans to remove their music from the platform over Ek’s “investment in AI war drones”, Deerhoof, who said they didn’t “want our success being tied to AI battle tech”, and Wu Lyf, who took down their latest single ‘A New Life Is Coming’ from the streaming service.

Ek has said that his new role in Spotify will reflect a European set-up, and that he will continue to have a hands-on approach with the company. Spotify board director Woody Marshall added that the leadership changes had been in motion for years.

“We have tremendous confidence in Alex and Gustav as they step into these roles,” Marshall said (via The Verge). “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.”

Controversy around Spotify and Daniel Ek extends beyond his ties to Helsing. In 2024, Ek sparked backlash for his comments relating to the cost of “creating content”, with countless users and musicians describing him as “out of touch”.

Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content. This has sparked my curiosity about the concept of long shelf life versus short shelf life. While much of what we see and hear quickly becomes obsolete, there are…

— Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) May 29, 2024

He would later walk back on his comments, saying that he had no intention of dismissing the struggles faced by musicians and using the “reductive” label of “content”.

Around that same time, the CEO came under fire as it was reported that Spotify had made profits of over €1billion (£860million), but at the expense of staff being laid off, artists struggling to make any income from streaming, and subscription prices rising.

It became even harder for artists to make money from the platform last year, when Spotify officially demonetised all songs on the platform with less than 1,000 streams. The policy was launched on April 1 2024, but had been planned by the platform for some time. It was quickly criticised for making it harder for artists to generate royalties and restricting new artists looking to crack the music industry.

Kate Nash was one of the many artists shedding light on the lack of pay-off, launching her “bum on the back of a fire truck” protest, heading to the London office of Spotify, and saying, via megaphone: “Artists are paid 0.003 of a penny per stream whilst [Spotify] demonetised 80 per cent of music on the platform.”

Primal Scream bassist Simone Marie Butler also spoke out against the platform, saying that Ek was “sitting on his yacht laughing at your Spotify top five while he cashes in on music he had nothing to do with, calls it ‘content’ and artists still get £0.04 per stream.”

Others to criticise the platform and its impact on the music industry have included Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante, who described streaming as the place “where music goes to die”, and Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth, who said he “owes it” to other musicians not to have an account.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor also shared how streaming has “mortally wounded” many artists, while James Blake claimed that “the brainwashing worked and now people think music is free”.

Last December, a site parodying Spotify Wrapped was taken down at the request of Spotify‘s legal team, after it calculated the amount users pay in subscription fees compared the royalties paid to the artists throughout the year.

At the start of 2025, nominees for the Songwriter Of The Year category at this year’s Grammy Awards boycotted Spotify’s party in retaliation to its treatment of songwriters.“After some thought, I couldn’t in good conscience support this initiative given their approach to bundling royalties,” said Jessie Jo Dillon, one of the artists boycotting. “It is very nice to be individually honoured, but it is better for me and my entire songwriter community to be paid fairly for our art. There are no songs without songwriters.”