How Many Streams Would an Artist Need to Earn as Much as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek? No One’s Close

The Big Green Circle has made plenty of green for Spotify CEO Daniel Ek over the past 12 months, with four separate stock sales netting about $345 million since last July. This led royalty accountant Hunter Giles to wonder, how many streams would it have taken for Ek to make the same amount of money through his own platform? The answer may surprise you (Narrator: They were not surprised).

Giles and the team at the Infinite Catalog newsletter used a “generous” estimate of $.003 per stream, as well as assuming that the artists own their publishing rights and masters, which is rarely the case. In order to make $345 million in one year, an artist would need 115 billion stream equivalents in 12 months — 15 billion more than Spotify’s most-streamed artist, Drake, has put up in his entire career.

The full breakdown is here, and Giles also shared this chart, which converts share values to streams and shows where different Spotify execs would land in the all-time streaming ranks.

One small quibble with this chart: Giles writes, “Ek cashed out more in 12 months than any artist has ever made on Spotify.” That’s a fair guess based on publicly-available information, but I don’t think it’s a confirmed fact. Spotify doesn’t actually pay artists per-stream; they use a secret formula, and the royalties differ based on the deals that Spotify reaches with labels and artists. In other words, some artists get paid more than others. So higher payouts for Drake or Taylor Swift would mean that Spotify gave them more in their careers than Ek made in 12 months.

Still, that’s one year of stock sales against the last 15 years of streaming. The overall point stands: The artists generating the most value for Spotify aren’t being paid anywhere close to as much as the CEO — which is just fine by Ek, since according to him, music “content” costs “close to zero” to create.

Taken together, this seems particularly hypocritical given the recent changes at Spotify. Earlier this year, the company announced a new royalty model which is estimated to pay songwriters $150 million less during its first year. They also just hiked prices, which might have helped them hit record profits in Q2 and led to the recent stock bonanza.

Ek isn’t Spotify’s most-streamed artist. But based on the company’s actions, he’s the only No. 1 that matters.