Panic Among the Streamers

While musicians faced an existential crisis during a pandemic, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s ownership stake in Spotify climbed to be worth over $4 billion. In order to earn $4 billion, a musician earning the median wage of $25,000 would have to work for 160,000 years – in other words, they’d have to have started working before human history began.

Spotify is rolling up the internet audio market, which their CEO, Daniel Ek, thinks will grow from $100 billion in revenue a year to somewhere near the video market, which is $1 trillion. People spend about the same amount of time consuming audio as video content. “Are our eyes,” he asks, “really worth 10 times more than our ears?”