Madeline Hess
Staff Writer
On Sept. 30, Daniel Ek announced that he will be stepping down as CEO for the streaming company. He will be replaced with Chief Product and Technology Officer Gustav Söderström and Chief Business Officer Alex Norström, who will work together as co-CEOs. This replacement will take place on Jan. 1, 2026.
Ek co-founded Spotify in 2006 with Martin Lorentzon. They were inspired to create Spotify due to the high levels of music piracy at the time and a lack of ethical streaming in the music scene. He has been a member of Spotify’s board since July 21, 2008. Before Spotify, he was the Chief Technology Officer of Stardoll, an online browser-based dress up game, the co-founder of Neko Health, a health-tech company based in the usage of AI scans for analyzing health data; the co-founder of investment company Prima Materia; and the founder of Advertigo, an online advertising company.
The main reason Ek is stepping down is to focus on other career ventures, mainly surrounding Prima Materia. He has expressed that he will remain involved with the platform, contribute input to larger company decisions, and take on the role of executive chairman. In his statement, he touched on the reasoning behind choosing Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström, saying that “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.”
Previous to their co-CEO positions, Söderström’s work was based in technology and engineering while Norström worked for content and marketing. They have been with Spotify for over fifteen years.
However, Ek and Spotify have been widely criticized recently, and have seen an uptick of users leaving the app due to recent events regarding advertisements and Ek’s personal investments. Ek, through his company Prima Materia, invested 600 million euros (693.6 million USD) towards AI military drone technology, based in the defense technology company Helsing, who Ek is also a chairman of. This technology is geared towards the use of artificial intelligence in military zones. Additionally, Spotify has been recently running ads for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment. Both of these issues have caused distress among a significant number of listeners. Spotify has refused to remove the ads, claiming that they are a part of a United States advertising policy. According to a spokesperson for Spotify, the advertisement “is part of a broad campaign the US government is running” across many different platforms and apps, particularly streaming. ICE recruitment ads have also been noticed on Pandora, HBO Max, YouTube, Hulu, LinkedIn, and Amazon Prime.
Due to these two topics, among others, many users have expressed their disdain towards the platform and urged others to boycott. Various bands, such as Deerhoof and Massive Attack, have pulled their music from Spotify but kept it on other music platforms such as Apple Music and YouTube Music. However, Spotify has stressed that Ek stepping down has been a possible action for a while and does not have to do with any of the current and previous controversies. However, it is still an interesting time for his stepping down, leading users and non-users to wonder if anything about the company will end up changing for the better.
Alex Norström has mentioned a focus on increasing Spotify’s user population, expressing that, “we have now hit 3% of the world’s population subscribing to Spotify. It’s not so unimaginable to think that we could have 10%, 15% of the world’s population subscribing to Spotify.”
However, this is something that could prove to be difficult for the company due to its recent actions. Whether or not the CEO change will alleviate the boycotts surrounding the streaming platform is something that is currently unknown. It may not be possible to predict if there will be any significant change, but this does prove useful to music streamers and musicians themselves about what they value in a platform and what matters the most to them-ethics or convenience.
