Spotify

What companies are leading in innovation in Europe in 2025?

Europe's Most Innovative Companies

Leaders in all industries rely more than ever on Big Tech—and appreciate the giants that deliver, at scale, without drama.

World's Most Admired Companies

The European edition of the Fortune 500, ranking companies by revenue.

Fortune 500 Europe

The first-ever European edition of the Fortune 500, ranking companies by revenue. 

F500 EUROPE 2023 SPOTIFY Music And Sound Streaming Platforms Stock Photos

Spotify Technology ranks 285 with $12.3 billion in revenue (up 7.9%). The Sweden-headquartered entertainment company has 8,359 employees and made a loss of $452 million.

These innovative companies are laying the foundations for robust growth—and outsize returns for shareholders.

FUTURE-50-2023-Spotify

Spotify has steadily pulled ahead in recent years in the streaming-audio wars: The company now claims an industry-leading market share of about 30%, with nearly 600 million monthly users and 226 million paid subscribers. Spotify continues to be at the center of heated debates over how much—or how little—musicians get paid for their work. But its growing influence in podcasting and live music as well as music streaming, along with its pricing power, have made investors optimistic. (Above: Dominican artist Natti Natasha performs at a Spotify-sponsored concert in Chicago.) Analysts forecast that Spotify’s revenue will top $14 billion in 2023 and grow another 19% in 2024.

The Future 50

Explore this year's ranking of the 50 companies with the best long-term growth potential.

Future 50-2020-Spotify

<p class="p1">Daniel Ek’s pioneering audio platform has always been a clever piece of Swedish kit—a two-sided marketplace that makes money both from listeners and creators. With the live-entertainment industry on its knees, thanks to a pandemic, Spotify has a fresh window of opportunity to double down on artist services and exclusive content (such as podcasts) and has proved effective at wooing customers away from competitors like Apple.</p>

Fortune's proprietary methodology allows us to zero in on the 50 global firms that are best poised to deliver—and continue delivering—above average gains.

Future 50

Overall Score

Sector

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Industry

Current All-Star Rank

Previous All-Star Rank

Industry Rank

Previous Industry Rank

Innovation

People Management

Use of Corporate Assets

Social Responsibility

Quality of Management

Financial Soundness

Long-Term Investment Value

Quality of Products/Services

Global Competitiveness

Strongest dimension

Years on list

Country

Get insights into Spotify including business profile, stock information, news, and rankings from Fortune.

Spotify (SPOT): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

spotify

Companies

Spotify | Fortune

Spotify (SPOT): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Nick Lichtenberg

Why the song of the summer is nearly 30 years old—and what it has to do with Gen Z’s nostalgic thirst for a ’90’s kid summer’

/2025/09/11/goo-goo-dolls-iris-song-of-summer-gen-z-90s-kid-summer/

Dave Lozo

Morning Brew

Spotify’s 696 million users can now message each other directly—incentivizing users to keep their eyes and ears on the app for longer

/2025/08/27/spotifys-696-million-users-can-now-message-each-other-directly-incentivizing-users-to-keep-their-eyes-and-ears-on-the-app-for-longer/

Andrew Nusca

The terms of the U.S. government’s 10% Intel stake

/2025/08/25/the-terms-of-the-u-s-governments-10-intel-stake/

Elon Musk is still the highest-paid CEO in history

/2025/08/05/elon-musk-is-still-the-highest-paid-ceo-in-history/

The EU has a bone to pick with Temu

/2025/07/30/eu-temu-illegal-products-global-500-spotify-earnings-palo-alto-networks-cyberark/

Why the song of the summer is nearly 30 years old—and what it has to do with Gen Z's nostalgic thirst for a '90's kid summer'

https://fortune.com/2025/09/11/goo-goo-dolls-iris-song-of-summer-gen-z-90s-kid-summer/?itm_source=parsely-api

Ryan Hogg

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations

https://fortune.com/europe/2024/04/23/spotify-earnings-q1-ceo-daniel-eklaying-off-1500-spotify-employees-negatively-affected-streaming-giants-operations/?itm_source=parsely-api

Lucas Shaw

Bloomberg

Spotify signs Bill Simmons, its $250 million man, to a new deal

https://fortune.com/2025/03/12/spotify-bill-simmons-podcast-ringer/?itm_source=parsely-api

Chloe Berger

Global pop star says she can’t afford to take a week off due to how little she gets paid from streaming

https://fortune.com/article/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream/?itm_source=parsely-api

Daniel Ek’s body scanning startup hits £1.4 billion valuation with 100,000 people lining up to pay £299 for a health check

https://fortune.com/europe/2025/01/23/daniel-ek-body-scanning-startup-valuation-100000-people-lining-up-pay-299-for-health-check/?itm_source=parsely-api

Spotify’s HR chief says remote staff aren’t ‘children’ as company sticks to work-from-anywhere policy

https://fortune.com/europe/2025/04/29/spotifys-hr-chief-remote-staff-arent-children-work-from-anywhere/?itm_source=parsely-api

Daniel Ek dashes 'magical' CEO illusions and says he's 'probably the least powerful person at Spotify' thanks to Scandinavian leadership model

https://fortune.com/europe/2024/01/18/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-scandinavian-leadership-model/?itm_source=parsely-api

Spotify's 696 million users can now message each other directly—incentivizing users to keep their eyes and ears on the app for longer

https://fortune.com/2025/08/27/spotifys-696-million-users-can-now-message-each-other-directly-incentivizing-users-to-keep-their-eyes-and-ears-on-the-app-for-longer/?itm_source=parsely-api

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Spotify’s CEO got roasted by artists after he said the cost of creating content is ‘close to zero.’ Now he’s trying to walk back his ‘clumsy’ remark

https://fortune.com/2024/06/03/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-content-cost-close-to-zero-stearming-subscription-fee-hike/?itm_source=parsely-api

What happens to the world’s largest media companies when the Big Tech spigot runs dry? As platforms tighten access and AI rewrites the rules of distribution, publishers face a seismic shift in how content is discovered. This conversation gathers leaders across technology, traditional publishing, and culture-defining entertainment media to examine how trusted brands can build influence, community, and lasting IP in a post-platform world where attention is fragmented and control is up for grabs.

Janice Min
Editor-in-Chief and CEO, Ankler Media 

Andrew Nusca
Editorial Director, Fortune Brainstorm 

Matthew Prince
Cofounder and CEO, Cloudflare 

Neil Vogel
Chief Executive Officer, People Inc. 

Bill Gross
Bill Gross, Founder, Idealab; Founder and CEO, ProRata.ai

Search Engine Zero: Who Controls the Future of Discovery

Conferences

When culture meets code, the future gets interesting. Grammy-winning artist and producer Wyclef Jean has long blurred the lines between creativity and technology: from mentoring Haiti’s next generation of roboticists to consulting for Google DeepMind. Jaeson Ma, CEO of OpenWav and a media power player behind ventures like 88rising and TikTok’s early success, is betting on the next big wave of digital storytelling. Together they explore the convergence of AI, entertainment, and the global creative economy, and what it means when artists become architects of the future.

Wyclef Jean
Grammy Award-Winning Artist, Producer, Composer; Chief Creative Officer, OpenWav 

Jaeson Ma
Cofounder and CEO, OpenWav 

Andrew Nusca
Editorial Director, Fortune Brainstorm

Soundwaves and Signals

Presenter: Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, ProRata AI; Founder and Chairman, Idealab

Brainstorm AI 2024: Building A Better Model For Creativity

I've been an entrepreneur all my life. And as a 16 year old in passing to California, I was reading Fortune Magazine looking up to all the incredible businesses that they spoke about. And then I had a chance to come to all these fortune conferences and learn so much from all of you and all the people at Fortune Magazine. And now here I am on stage telling you about a new idea. So it's really thrilling to be here. Thank you so much. What I want to talk about today is the disruptive world we're living in right now, which is just more disruptive than anything I've ever seen. You. Cue to my slides, please. We are living in wildly disruptive times. And the question is how will creators survive in these times? Think back to all the different technological revolutions and how creators how to adapt to be able to thrive back to the printing press, radio, television and of course the internet. But I think these times are even different than anything we've ever seen before. I think this A I disruption will dwarf anything we've seen in our lifetimes. I put up on this slide four things that I saw in my lifetime which when I saw them I saw thought the world will never be the same. I go back to the IBM PC in 1981. It actually came out the very month I graduated from college. I went down to my local computer land store in Pasadena, California bought a $5000 monochrome machine with two floppy drives and 256 K of ram for $5000 no hard drive because the hard drive hadn't been invented yet. But it completely blew my mind and of course, it changed the world. It led to a whole new form of creativity code and led to trillions of dollars of wealth creation. Then Netscape in 1994 when I saw that, I also felt the world will never be the same. In fact, I was running a company called Knowledge, a venture at the time selling educational software for kids. And we sold that company in 1995. And now I had all these new ideas for internet companies that you could build on top of the browser. I put down my favorite 12 ideas and I was trying to select which one I wanted to start. And I actually decided to start all 12. And the way I did that was by starting idea lab, a technology incubator where I could start all 12 at once under one roof. One of the companies we started based on the browser was a company called Go to. We invented paper click advertising and it completely changed the way monetization worked on the internet. We were really proud of that, but that just shows how new models are needed whenever there's a new platform, a new technology. And of course, the mobile revolution has been talked about already today that changed all of our lives in 1994. When I started looking at Netscape and seeing how powerful it was, there were 30 million browsers in the world, think about how pitiful small that is compared to the number of mobile devices that are on the planet. Now, 5 billion supercomputers in everybody's pockets all over the world. So all these changes were so dramatic. And then November 2022 we're at the twoyear anniversary of CG BT being released. I remember playing it with that, that one day and saying this is going to change everything. And of course it has, it's led to a trillion dollars of wealth creation and expenditures in just two years, not like the PC, which took two decades for that kind of impact to be felt. So when you have something that big, why does it cost so much change? Well, hugely disruptive changes occur when the cost of something approaches zero with the internet, the cost of distribution approach zero with the cloud, the cost of storage approach zero and with generative A I, the cost of knowledge or knowledge creation is approaching zero. So what does that mean for content creators when the cost change that dramatically, this disruptive moment is really, really large. Well, until now one side of the equation, some of the gene A I companies are saying the content must be free. The other side of the equation, the content producers are suing on the one side, you have Mustafa from Microsoft saying everything on the internet can be used for free to train A I models or Sam who is saying we need this copyrighted material for free to make this business model work. On the other side, you have the New York Times, Dow Jones and many, many other companies suing a lot of the generative A I companies because they feel their content is being stolen in a funny tweet Ariel Dumas says I've been told to stop stealing muffins from the bakery. Unfortunately, it's the only way to keep my lucrative muffin stand of business. Everyone is fine with this and of course, there's sarcasm here, but it's maybe not that far from the truth about companies lifting other people's content and using it without paying for it. And that leads to a dilemma today. Well, in almost all other forms of digitization revenue is shared, I'll give you some examples right here on the App Store and on Google Play revenue shared with creators on Spotify revenue shared with the artist. In fact, Spotify shows that you can make a business like this work even with significant revenue share, Spotify's market cap just today crossed $100 billion. They had $16 billion of revenue and $10 billion of revenue was shared with creators. It was shared based on counting the streams that were played youtube shares revenue, full 5050 revenue share sharing revenue with the street, with the person who created the stream, Apple music and also Apple News. Apple News is another example of another method of counting. You can count by streams, you can count by views or downloads. Apple News counts by minutes minutes spent in different media content. And Apple News took in $2.3 billion of subscriptions last year and they paid out 1.15 billion to all the content partners who provide the content and even in the physical world for offline distribution revenue is shared companies like Nielsen Ascap BM I count and share revenue in those use cases as well. So why are there no revenue shared standard in generative A I? It's because there's no simple streams or views or downloads to count the answers that come from generated I generative A I are an amalgam of different content. But what if you could reverse engineer the output of generative A I and figure out what content contributed to the answer that would enable a fair revenue share. So right now, some of the A I companies are saying we don't want to pay because we can't afford to. We don't think we have to. But some generative A I companies are saying we can't pay because we don't know how to. Well, what if there are a way to solve how to, well, that's what we set out to do. We set out to create an algorithm that could take a look at the operative gen A I, whether it's text images, movies or music, analyze it using A I and figure out where that content came from. And not only figure out where it came from, figure out the percentage that came from each place. And just today, we launched this new search product called GIST at G dot A I. You can go type in a query and you see an attribution bar at the top that attribution bar at the very top is breaking down the sources and where how they contributed to the answer. So for example, in this particular question, 34% came from the Atlantic, 25% came from time, 25% came from Fortune. Fortune is one of our partners and 16% came from the Guardian and all of the sources are called out clearly on the right. This then allows us to share revenue 50 to 50 with all those partners on that exact pro rata basis. We think this is fair. We think this is a great way to encourage monetization of content in the generative A I era but also encourage by providing a business model for more creators to continue to make great content to power. Generative A I. If generative I only starts using synthetic data for its training, the result in quality will go way down. But if content creators have the incentive to keep on creating great content, the quality will go up. So we really believe this is the future and we really want to try and make something like this be the standard. We really feel that generative A I needs to be ethical and fair to make this grow and thrive. I showed you the example with text. It also could be done for images. Here's an example, the prompt that was typed in was generate an image of a mass red superhero that can climb walls, meta generated this image. We look at that image, we analyze it, we look at all the source images and we figured out that this came 90.3% from Marvel and 6.2% from DC Entertainment. Again, giving us the exact percentages so the revenue can be shared. So engine of A I, it is now fully possible to look at the output and figure out who contributed uniquely to that content. So far, hundreds of publications, authors and musicians and artists have joined our system. Actually 400 as of today, 20 more just joined this morning, we made an announcement this morning of new ones including a company called Lee Enterprises which has 71 markets around the United States. And we're working with them to revolutionize the way local news is surfaced in generative A I and also the way local news can monetize with generative advertising as well. We really feel that this is a new frontier. If you think back to search and how it's gone through multiple iterations, search 1.0 was monetized with banner ads. Think back to excite and Lycos and Altavista and Yahoo search 2.0 was monetized with paper click. I believe that search 3.0 which we're seeing right now will just deliver you answers directly. You won't have to click but it will be monetized with paper use. The paper use is the ability for the content creators to make some revenue every time their content is used. Of course, their content also can be used for training, but that's a one time fee just for training. The model paper use enables the content creators to have a sustainable revenue model that can be ongoing. So pro rata dot I enables pro rata compensation on this paper use basis. And I really feel I'm so passionate about this because I really want to make a world where content creators can thrive where it's fair and ethical for everybody and everybody can participate and wherever the content is created anywhere on earth, it could be surfaced in answers to help you have the best content possible and to make a revenue stream monetti, I'd love to work with any of you here. I'd love to have some of you join our Pro Rata platform. But mostly I would like feedback and ideas on how to make this a more successful, thriving ecosystem around generative A. I feel free to reach out to me directly. I'm Bill at pro rata dot A. I thank you very much. You've been a great audience.

D.A. Wallach, Recording Artist; Co-founder and General Partner, Time BioVentures

Brainstorm Health 2024: Lessons from the Music Industry

Well, thank you very much. It's great to be here following an actual death panel. And um as you heard in my introduction, I'm a bit of an odd duck. Um I run a biotech and health care venture fund in L A called Time Bio Ventures, but this was my previous life. And as you can tell from this photo, uh you should take everything I say today with a grain of salt. I want to talk a little bit about the parallels between the lessons we've learned in the music industry and what I perhaps see uh on the horizon for the healthcare sector. And when I was in college and got my first record deal, we entered the industry at a remarkable time when things were in total freefall. So what you see in this graph here is us, recorded music revenue over time starting from about 1970 the peak is the absolute bonanza of an era that the nineties were as the recorded music industry resold the entire history of music uh on compact discs, people were just rolling in cash. And when we got our first record deal in 2007 this freefall had been catalyzed by the advent of Napster and then youtube and with it, the erosion of consumer spending on recorded music. So you probably remember these record stores, they were progressively going out of business at this time. And a couple of years after we entered the industry, I had the good fortune of meeting the founders of Spotify. And when I saw their product, I was just completely blown away by the potential that I saw in it to get people paying for music. Again, it was such a compelling product that you could imagine consumers going from free music to something uh for which they would pay a monthly subscription. And that's exactly what happened. The old music supply chain was I think to a lot of folks at that time, clearly anachronistic and you'll remember these days, it was basically this very clunky intermediate system to get content to consumers. So you'd go into a brick and mortar record store and you'd sort of prostrate in front of Grand Wizard of music who would query their huge brain for all of the history of records. And they'd recommend to you just the perfect record to get in this example, the Jimi Hendrix experience. And that record typically would have come through one of just a few record labels like capital or Sony that were basically the sole distribution channel through which artists could get their content into their fan base. And Spotify succeeded by dramatically simplifying that connection between consumers and content. And it put all consumers on an equal footing such that they could access the same catalog of music globally for a very low monthly price. And here's the end of that story or at least up until today, what's happened with streaming, which is depicted in green here, consumers started to pay and revive the industry. Health care in some ways has the exact opposite problem, which is that we're spending too much and the amount that we're spending is growing too fast. And most of that spending is on our hospital centric business model. So as you can see from this breakdown of the 4.5 trillion we're spending in the US per year, something between 70 80% of it is basically going to human mediated health care services, be it in hospitals or brick and mortar clinics. And this model, as I see, it is really trapped in an 18th and 19th century factory paradigm where the concept is basically get a bunch of big brains into big buildings and you'll realize production efficiencies. And we have similar issues in education with large universities and in criminal justice. These are all a paradigms that originated in the 18th and 19th century and they're all in certain similar ways failing us today that fits into a supply chain. It might be a little bit of a stretch. But I think it's actually reminiscent of the music industry supply chain that I described previously. Instead of going into a record store, you go into a hospital or a clinic and you're seen by a physician who queries their huge brain which has been stuffed full of information, the whole corpus of medical knowledge. And they will try and identify for you the perfect intervention. And if that happens to be a drug as here, that drug will have come from one of a few large pharmaceutical companies like pfizer, which similar to the record labels are essentially now the distributors for those who really create new medicines, which are the small and mid size biotech companies. And so the question I want to raise is whether we should do to these and please forgive me when I was putting these together. I did not know that Johns Hopkins or CV S were sponsors of this great event. Nothing against either of them. I think they're fantastic organizations just a little bit dated. And so I wonder if we should do to these, what we did to these and if we do, what would the equivalent of Spotify even be, what would streaming medicine be? What I propose? Is that what we need to build? And this includes A I and a lot of the other technologies that people have been talking about today. And yesterday is a single global catalog containing all medical knowledge, all diagnostics, all interventions and all medical reasoning. Essentially the super A I of medicine in the cloud to which people can connect from anywhere in the world and connect to the exact same knowledge just like today. They connect to the same music catalog through Spotify or the same film and TV catalog through services like Netflix. My belief is that this type of knowledge centralization is actually the only way to make medicine modern and I would define modern medicine as evidence-based. I don't see why we should distinguish between medicine and evidence-based medicine. I don't think anyone goes to the hospital looking for non evidence based medicine. It should be personalized with validated algorithms that are universally applicable to patients. Uh everywhere in the world, it should always be up to date. So the standard of care that someone gets in Botswana should be exactly the same that they get in Los Angeles or New York. Uh We should be honest that if we're not giving people the same high quality care everywhere, we're doing that because they're poor, not because they deserve a different standard of care and it should be geography and income invariant again, the same medicine no matter where you are, no matter who you are with that type of centralization of knowledge. I believe we can actually decentralize the care itself. So on the one hand, centralize the information out of hospitals, sort of evaporated it into the cloud and then push down care into the community through decentralized delivery. And I've chosen the village people here, not because I think they should be your doctor, but just to make the point that perhaps people who today have different jobs even outside of health care in the future, when paired with this type of technology streaming medicine could end up being superior as a way of delivering care to even super doctors like house. And so I think in the future, we're going to marvel at the fact that you had to be a genius to be a doctor in the past. I actually think that's a moral imperative because lowering the barriers to medical competence is the only way that we can possibly scale up high quality care globally. What you see here is that the darker countries are those with a higher density of physicians per capita in the US. It's about three doctors per 1000 when you get into countries like Madagascar. Uh it's less than 1/10 of a doctor per 1000 people. So we're not going to fix that by manufacturing doctors in our current paradigm, it's just impossible. I would propose that maybe the doctor of the future is more like an accountant. It's a highly trained specialized person, but not necessarily someone who is educated for 15 or 20 years. And I think there are a million potential configurations of how those sorts of professionals could fit into something like streaming medicine to deliver better care. But this is just one kind of spitball idea. I came up with, imagine that patients get a voucher to spend on choosing a sort of primary care navigator and then hire this person. This is again like the sort of health care accountant character and they're paid directly by this voucher, not by insurance. So take primary care out of insurance, put them entirely on the side of the patient. And then this team, the patient, their care professional working with streaming medicine can navigate the system and choose the best products and services to cure them and then align cost savings with patients, let them capture the savings that they generate by navigating their own care in a thoughtful and cost effective way. Again, apologies to CVS and Johns Hopkins. But a couple of weeks ago, we learned Wal Mart is not going to save us. And I don't think that this is a particularly exciting future either. I would be shocked if 100 years from now, the way we're doing medicine is in minute clinics and huge buildings. And fortunately in my day job, we get to see amazing entrepreneurs coming up with all the little seeds of this future that I'm outline and we're not investors in all or even most of these companies, but I think they're really promising. And I would invite any of you who are working on this, who sort of believe in blowing up the system and starting from a blank sheet of paper to reach out to us. We're super excited to engage in entrepreneurs who are thinking really big and I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Spotify

Spotify in Fortune Rankings

Spotify stock chart

Videos