Spotify turned 20 on Thursday only months after Daniel Ek, who founded the $100 billion music juggernaut stepped down as CEO.
Ek, who cofounded Spotify in 2006 in Stockholm, in January stepped into a new role as executive chairman role with a focus on big-picture moves and capital-allocation decisions.
The company has elevated co-presidents Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström to serve as co-CEOs. Norström was previously chief business officer overseeing subscriptions and content, among other responsibilities, while Söderström was chief product and technology officer.
Ek, though, will be hard to replace. The 43-year-old tech leader founded the company at a time when the music industry was dominated by iTunes but also plagued by music piracy sites like LimeWire and Napster.
“The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry,” Ek told The Telegraph in 2010.
At the time, he took a bet on a controversial idea—that people wouldn’t mind not owning the music they listened to if it meant easy access to a seemingly unlimited catalog of songs and albums.
After years of negotiating with record companies, Spotify launched in its home country of Sweden and other EU countries in 2008 with a significant catalog and an attractive “freemium” business model that let users listen for free with ads. It launched in the U.S. in 2011.
Spotify continued gaining popularity and went public in 2018. Its stock is up about 248% since then, and the company has a market cap of about $106 billion as of Thursday. In recent years, Ek oversaw the company’s efforts to expand into podcasts, which saw it ink landmark deals with Joe Rogan, Barack Obama, and Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The company began paring back its exclusive podcast deals in 2023.
Being the ‘least powerful person’ in the room
Speaking during a live recording of the In Good Company podcast in 2024, Ek said he was “probably the least powerful person in Spotify,” thanks to its Scandinavian business model, which he said empowers other leaders. Ek said at the time that although he’s in the top position, he doesn’t necessarily have the final say for many business decisions because the Scandinavian model encourages a flat management structure. True to its roots, the company also offers generous perks to its workers such as a work-from-anywhere policy and six months of parental leave for workers regardless of their gender.
Over the past two decades, Ek has helped grow Spotify into a behemoth of the music industry, while also facing criticism at times for the royalties it pays artists. One of the world’s most popular artists, Taylor Swift, pulled her music from the service in 2014 over payment concerns, before returning to the service three years later. Small artists also complained about a 2024 change where Spotify stopped paying artists with fewer than 1,000 streams. The company last year said it paid out a record $11 billion in royalties to the music industry.
Spotify says it currently hosts more than 100 million tracks, 7 million podcast titles, and 500,000 audiobooks for its more than 750 million global users. It became profitable in 2024—and when he announced he would step down last September, Ek said in a statement he thinks the company will remain strong in the future under new leadership.
“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,” he said.
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on September 30, 2025.
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