Spotify Is, For Now, The World's Most Valuable Music Company

Following its successful public listing yesterday, the music streaming service Spotify is now worth around $25 billion, making it the largest music company in the world — but when Spotify first débuted, back in 2008, it was reasonable to think it would fail. Headquartered in Sweden, a country whose recording industry had shrunk to a third of its previous size due to piracy, the company was located far from the Silicon Valley sphere of influence. Steve Jobs had called the streaming business model "bankrupt," and Apple was instead promoting the sale of downloadable MP3 files from the iTunes Store. Spotify, trying to exploit an exhausted niche between the pirates and the iPod, seemed a long bet.

Ten years later and paid iTunes downloads are a year. The, and, for a new generation of listeners, BitTorrent technology is likely as unfamiliar as the fax machine. Despite its pre-eminence, Spotify still hasn't made any money, but it does have 71 million paying subscribers — and the most valuable agglomeration of listener data in the business. And Daniel Ek, its co-founder and CEO, now owns shares worth at least $4 billion (including warrants and options), making him the richest man in the history of music. Compare Ek's holdings to the size of whole companies within music: Vivendi, the French parent company of the world's largest record label, is worth around $27 billion — and is also diversified into European film and television production and distribution; Live Nation, which is so pervasive and dominant in the touring industry that the Department of Justice is , is worth around $8 billion; Tencent Music, China's dominant streaming platform, is estimated to be worth .