Spotify Names Co-CEOs as Founder Daniel Ek Steps Back

Spotify’s chief executive is leaving that job as the streaming music platform names co-CEOs.

Daniel Ek, who founded the Swedish company 19 years ago, announced his pending departure in a message shared with employees Tuesday (Sept. 30).

He will transition to company chairman, with Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s co-presidents, set to become co-CEOs on Jan. 1.

“We couldn’t be better positioned. And to be clear, I’m not leaving. I’ll remain deeply involved in the big, defining decisions about our future,” Ek wrote.

Those decisions include discussions of capital allocations and Spotify’s long-term plans, the company said.

Norström is also Spotify’s chief business officer, overseeing the platform’s subscriber and advertising businesses and “all licensed, distributed, and owned content on the platform across music, podcasts, and audiobooks,” per his company bio.

Söderström is the company’s chief product and technology officer, responsible for Spotify’s global product and technology strategy as well as overseeing its product, design, data and engineering teams.

“Nearly three years ago, when we stepped into our role 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,” the executives said in a prepared statement.

“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.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke recently with Sandra Alzetta, vice president and global head of commerce and customer service at Spotify, about the company’s approach to payments.

“We do a lot of painted door tests, which are helpful. If we put a payment method up and we’re seeing a lot of clicks on it, then that’s telling us something,” Alzetta said during a discussion for the PYMNTS Monday Conversation series hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

“Our philosophy is very much to start with user choice,” she added. “We want to make sure that our users are able to pay in the way that feels natural to them and that best meets their needs.”

Also this month, Spotify announced it was increasing its focus on rooting out artificial intelligence-driven spam. The company said it had removed more than 75 million spam tracks in the last year, many of them ultra-short or duplicate files uploaded to game royalty rules. Instead, Spotify said it was rolling out a “music spam filter” that tags suspicious uploads and suppresses them in recommendation systems rather than deleting them outright.