Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming service, is bracing for a major leadership shakeup as founder and CEO Daniel Ek prepares to step down after nearly two decades at the helm. On September 30, 2025, the Stockholm-based company announced that Ek will transition to executive chairman on January 1, 2026, ushering in a new era defined by a co-CEO structure and mounting scrutiny over the company’s ethics and business practices.
Ek, who has led Spotify since its founding in 2006, will hand day-to-day operations over to Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström. Söderström, currently Co-President and Chief Product & Technology Officer, and Norström, Co-President and Chief Business Officer, will become co-CEOs. Both are seasoned Spotify veterans with more than 15 years at the company. Their appointments are pending shareholder approval, but both will report directly to Ek and serve on the company’s Board of Directors.
In a statement quoted by The Rock Revival, Ek reflected on Spotify’s journey and his own evolving role: “I always believed that Spotify could play an important role in revolutionizing listening around the world, and with more than 700 million users, we’ve truly charted a new course bringing creativity to every corner of the globe. 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. This change simply matches titles to how we already operate. In my role as Executive Chairman, I will focus on the long arc of the company and keep the Board and our co-CEOs deeply connected through my engagement.”
Woody Marshall, Lead Independent Director of Spotify’s Board, expressed confidence in the new leadership, telling The Rock Revival, “We have tremendous confidence in Alex and Gustav as they step into these roles. 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. We are also thrilled that Daniel will be actively involved, giving Spotify both founder-led strategic stewardship and mentorship to the co-CEOs as the company continues to innovate and scale.”
The incoming co-CEOs, Söderström and Norström, issued a joint statement: “We’ve worked together a very long time and have seen Spotify through many different chapters. Nearly three years ago, when we stepped into our roles as co-Presidents, we charged our teams with relentlessly focusing on building the best and most valuable experience available anywhere and that ambition hasn’t changed. While we bring different experiences and perspectives to the CEO role, we both have a strong bias to action and can’t wait to get started knowing that we will have Daniel’s full partnership and ongoing support.”
Spotify’s leadership transition comes at a pivotal moment for the company, which only reported its first annual profit in 2024 following a series of price hikes and cost-cutting measures. Since its U.S. debut in 2011, Spotify has played a central role in reviving a music industry battered by piracy and falling CD sales. But the company now faces stiff competition from tech giants such as Apple, YouTube, and Amazon, all vying for dominance in the streaming market.
Yet the leadership news is only part of Spotify’s story. In recent months, the company has been embroiled in controversy over a €600 million (approximately $700 million) investment in Helsing, a European defense-AI firm, led by Prima Materia—a private investment fund co-founded by Daniel Ek. According to The Guardian and Rolling Stone, the deal, announced in June 2025, triggered a wave of backlash among musicians and fans who object to the world’s largest music platform being linked, even indirectly, to battlefield technologies.
Helsing, based in Munich, develops AI software for military applications, including reconnaissance-to-strike systems, autonomous drones, and underwater surveillance vehicles. The company’s stated mission is to “protect democracies,” with a promise that “a human stays in or on the loop for all critical decisions.” However, as the Financial Times and Reuters reported, Helsing’s technology is explicitly designed to find, track, and destroy military targets—and the company says its AI is already supporting Ukraine’s defense efforts.
The distinction between Ek’s personal investments and Spotify’s corporate funds did little to quell the uproar. As Rolling Stone noted, “When the public face of Spotify chairs a defense unicorn ramping up AI-enabled drones, the reputational blowback lands on the service itself, where the artists’ catalogs live and where subscribers vote with their wallets.”
The backlash quickly escalated. By late June and July 2025, independent artists such as Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu announced plans to remove their music from Spotify, citing ethical concerns over Ek’s “AI battle tech” ties. The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian reported that Massive Attack, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and other notable acts joined the boycott, describing Spotify’s association with lethal technologies as a “moral and ethical burden.” Local musician unions and collectives organized open pledges to leave the platform, and the protest gained traction in culture and tech magazines as well as human-rights groups.
Despite the fact that the $700 million investment came from Ek’s private fund, not Spotify’s own treasury, the episode compounded long-standing grievances about streaming economics. Spotify’s pro-rata payout model—where all subscription and ad revenue is pooled and distributed based on share of total streams—means that artists often see only a fraction of a cent per play. According to reporting by The Rock Revival and industry trackers, Spotify’s effective per-stream payout ranges between $0.002 and $0.005, with the company paying over $10 billion to music rightsholders in 2024 alone. However, these billions are split among millions of tracks and intermediaries, leaving most artists with meager earnings.
In 2024, Spotify introduced a new rule requiring tracks to reach at least 1,000 streams in a year before generating any royalties, a move intended to combat fraud and spam uploads. While Spotify and trade press framed this as redirecting funds from ultra-micro payouts back to more popular tracks, critics argue it further disadvantages emerging artists. The company has also removed tens of millions of spam tracks as AI-driven uploads surged, another pressure point that dilutes earnings in the pro-rata pool.
Spotify’s data shows that an artist with one out of every million streams on the service generated over $10,000 on average in 2024, but the vast majority of artists fall far below that threshold. Payouts depend heavily on audience size, region, and the artist’s contract with labels or distributors. For many, the economics of streaming remain a source of frustration and activism.
The controversy over Helsing’s AI investments has given artists a new rallying point, connecting their financial grievances to broader ethical debates about technology, war, and the future of music. As The Guardian put it, Spotify has become a “proxy battlefield for arguments about who profits from music in the AI age—and what those profits ultimately build.”
As Daniel Ek prepares to step back from daily operations, Spotify’s new leadership faces the challenge of steering the company through a turbulent cultural and technological landscape. Whether the boycott will grow or fade remains to be seen, but the episode has left an indelible mark on the streaming giant’s identity—and raised difficult questions about the intersection of art, technology, and ethics in a rapidly changing world.
