Daniel Ek will step down as Spotify CEO on January 1, 2026. He will not be leaving the company but will instead become Spotify's chairman. The CEO role will then be taken over by Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström, who previously held the positions of co-president and chief business officer of Spotify.
This is the biggest change in Spotify's leadership since it was founded in 2006 to tackle piracy in the music industry. Ek's resignation comes after a boycott movement against Spotify after he invested in a military technology company.
Spotify is the world's largest music streaming platform with over 700 million monthly active users. While the streaming platform has successfully tackled music piracy for the past decade, it has also created problems with increasingly expensive subscriptions and declining artist payments.