Spotify Expose :
You’ve heard of Spotify but have you heard of Daniel EK it’s CEO?, what follows is a journey of exploration undertaken by Lipcrack to determine some of the reasons why we might be having troubles with Spotify. It includes a look at the history and paper trail of music through to warfare. But be warned it’s not light reading.
Daniel Ek apparently originally built Spotify partly around the idea of solving the music industry’s enormous piracy problem and making music more accessible. Now, decades later, he’s using the wealth generated from that enterprise to pursue interests that are almost completely outside music, namely high end military defense. The difference feels so striking because music and warfare represent almost opposite human purposes.
Music is generally associated with expression, emotion, imagination, identity and connection. Warfare is associated with conflict, destruction, deterrence and the application of force. Putting the two beside each other creates a very strong psychological contrast. Music can influence people without physically forcing them to do anything. A song can change someone’s mood, bring back memories, create solidarity, provoke anger, or make thousands of strangers feel that they belong to the same thing.
Military technology is a completely different mechanism it also attempts to change human behaviour — through deterrence, surveillance, capability and, ultimately, force.
So what does that have to do with Spotify?
Spotify has built an extraordinary system for discovering music, but it hasn’t really built an equally accessible system for artists to buy legitimate discovery. An independent artist is largely told: “Go somewhere else and find people to bring here.” Spotify has the information necessary to provide a safe promotional ecosystem, but much of the responsibility for finding listeners has been pushed onto artists and third-party services — some of which apparently create exactly the sort of activity Spotify subsequently doesn’t like.
Why would I bring it up again, because Lipcrack have had the track “Fucked Up My Life” removed from a range of distributor services including Spotify due to an alleged Spotify report. This time however because I feel so compelled to protest that (because we didn’t employ another service), I went beyond the contractual agreements to see what I could find and it led to an astounding paper trail which I’m about to explore with our readers.
Spotify was built through a combination of technology, investor funding and licensing agreements with the major record labels, some of which also received shares in Spotify. The labels therefore weren’t simply suppliers of music; historically, they also had a financial interest in Spotify’s success.
Daniel Ek grew up in Sweden and was interested in computers and technology from a very young age. Before Spotify, he had already made money from technology businesses, including working on online advertising. The turning point was the music piracy problem of the early 2000s. He was apparently a heavy user of Napster himself (file sharing, copyright infringement and piracy). What fascinated him was that consumers had discovered something they really wanted — instant access to enormous amounts of music — but the legal music industry couldn’t provide anything remotely as convenient. Ek wasn’t primarily trying to convince people that piracy was morally wrong. He was trying to change the economics and convenience of the experience. Napster eventually went bust due to various litigations against the company and that’s where Spotify stepped in.
The basic equation:
People want access to music → artists/rightsholders need to be paid → make legal access so convenient that people choose it.
That’s a big part of why Spotify’s free tier was so important. It lowered the barrier to adoption enormously.
So how does Spotify allow you to download whole albums without paying for it? Because “download” on Spotify doesn’t mean “own a copy of the album.”
If you’re using Spotify Premium, you can download an entire album to your phone or computer for offline listening, but Spotify is essentially giving you a temporary encrypted/cache copy under the terms of your subscription.
There are a few protections involved:
🎵 The files aren’t ordinary MP3s that you can take elsewhere.
🔒 They’re stored in Spotify’s controlled format/cache rather than as freely usable music files.
📱 You can play them only through Spotify.
❌ You can’t normally copy the downloaded album to another player or give it to someone.
💳 You need to remain an eligible Premium subscriber to retain offline playback.
🌐 Spotify periodically needs you to connect to the internet so it can verify your account/subscription.
One of the cleverest aspects of the streaming model, the listener gets something that feels very similar to owning the music — “I’ve got the whole album on my phone” — while Spotify retains control over the underlying files and the rights remain with the relevant copyright owners.
It also explains why Spotify can offer millions of albums for one monthly subscription without giving subscribers permanent ownership of those recordings.
Spotify’s global headquarters is in Stockholm, Sweden — which makes sense given that Daniel Ek and co-founder Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify there in 2006.
Spotify Technology S.A. is legally incorporated in Luxembourg, however, and that’s an important distinction:
🇸🇪 Stockholm, Sweden — Spotify’s operational/global headquarters and where the company was founded.
🇱🇺 Luxembourg — Spotify Technology S.A.’s legal domicile.
🇺🇸 New York City — Spotify has a major corporate presence there and has historically described New York as one of its principal offices.
🌎 Spotify has offices throughout Europe, North America, Latin America and elsewhere.
So if you’re wondering “where does Spotify actually come from?”, the answer is very definitely Stockholm, Sweden.
Spotify → creates Daniel Ek’s enormous personal wealth and business platform → Ek uses that wealth through Prima Materia to build/invest in other companies.
Spotify is still enormously important to him: he remains founder and Executive Chairman and has substantial ownership/voting influence. But Prima Materia is the vehicle through which he’s deliberately trying to build a portfolio of technology companies outside music.
Helsing is one of these companies.
🇩🇪 Headquarters: Munich, Germany
🏭 Drone manufacturing: Helsing has manufacturing operations in Germany, including a factory in southern Germany producing the HX-2.
🇬🇧 🇫🇷 🇪🇪 It also has operations/subsidiaries in the UK, France and Estonia.
🇺🇦 It has worked extensively with Ukraine, including supplying its HF-1 and HX-2 systems.
Spotify itself is a separate public company. Daniel Ek founded it in 2006 and is now its Executive Chairman, having stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025. Now you might be asking why that happened and we have some information which may piece those pieces of the puzzle together and lets face it this puzzle has at least a 1000 pieces.
Prima Materia is the key piece. Daniel Ek and Shakil Khan established Prima Materia as an investment/building company. Its own description is quite explicit: it aims to build and develop companies for the long term, providing capital, networks and support. Its focus includes areas such as AI, clean energy, healthcare and natural resources.
And Prima Materia specifically says: “There is no connection to Spotify.” It operates independently, despite Daniel Ek being involved with both.
Some of the major ventures associated with Daniel Ek include:
Helsing — European defence/AI technology, where Ek is chairman and Prima Materia has made a very large investment.
Neko Health — preventative healthcare/medical technology, co-founded by Ek.
H2 Green Steel/Stegra — green steel.
Various investments involving AI, climate technology and other European technology companies.
Now what of these Defense Investments ?
AI Military Tech: Co-founder and former CEO Daniel Ek invested hundreds of millions of euros through his venture firm into Helsing, an artificial intelligence defense company building military drones and weapons.
The evidence shows Daniel Ek personally controlled a substantial amount of Spotify equity. Spotify’s 2025 annual filing lists him as beneficially owning about 28.6 million ordinary shares, representing 13.9% of the ordinary shares, plus substantial voting control through beneficiary certificates.
So, in principle, there is a very straightforward way his Spotify wealth could become funding for these other ventures:
Spotify shares → sell/monetise shares → personal/investment-company capital → Prima Materia → Helsing
Recently €600 million dollars went into the Helsing investment.
What we can establish is:
Daniel Ek built much of his personal fortune through Spotify.
He established Prima Materia as his investment company and committed roughly €1 billion of his personal wealth to European technology investments.
Prima Materia invested €100 million in Helsing in 2021. In 2025, Prima Materia led a €600 million funding round in Helsing, valuing the company at about €12 billion.
The investment round was a mixture of traditional equity and other financing, and there were other investors involved.
Did Daniel Ek/Prima Materia sell, pledge, borrow against, or otherwise monetise Spotify shares around the time of the €600m Helsing investment?
Ek explicitly described the money committed to Prima Materia as coming from his personal fortune. In 2021, when Prima Materia put €100 million into Helsing, contemporary reporting said Ek had pledged approximately €1 billion of his personal wealth to European technology investments. We can also establish that he owned a very large amount of Spotify stock. Spotify’s own filings identify millions of shares held through D.G.E. Investments, which was ultimately controlled by Ek. From the SEC filings, D.G.E. Investments Limited is a Cyprus-registered holding company that has historically held a large portion of Daniel Ek’s Spotify shares.
Daniel Ek → D.G.E. Holding Limited → D.G.E. Investments Limited → Spotify shares
And in June 2025, Prima Materia led the €600 million Helsing financing round. Importantly, the reporting says this was a combination of traditional equity and other financing, with other investors participating. Below is an example of three ways the money paper trail could have gone.
Spotify shares → sell shares → cash → investment
or
Spotify shares → collateral for borrowing → cash → investment
or simply
existing personal cash/investment assets → Prima Materia → Helsing (the defense company)
Ek became enormously wealthy through Spotify. Spotify’s 2025 annual report says that as of December 31, 2025, Daniel Ek beneficially owned/controlled approximately 28.6 million ordinary shares.
Using the US$547.51 per share price you asked about:
28,600,000 × $547.51 = US$15,658,786,000
So that’s approximately:
US$15.66 billion worth of Spotify shares.
At that share price, every 1 million Spotify shares are worth about US$547.5 million
And remember, Ek has actually sold portions of his Spotify holdings in recent years — reporting based on SEC filings says he had already cashed out around US$666 million through sales up to February 2025.
SEC filings show multiple sales in 2024 and 2025; for example, he sold about US$29.2 million of Spotify shares on March 5, 2025. The Financial Times reported that Ek sold nearly US$350 million of Spotify stock during 2024 alone.
There’s an especially interesting detail: reporting in May 2025 said Ek had been selling shares roughly every two weeks since the beginning of 2025, totalling about 2.6 billion Swedish kronor by that point.
That doesn’t prove those particular shares provided money for Helsing. However, it demonstrates that the reduction in his Spotify position represents an enormous amount of potential liquidity.
And given that we’re checking out whether there’s a financial connection between his Spotify wealth and Prima Materia/Helsing, I think the next thing worth looking at is the actual SEC sale records for those 500,000 shares — dates, quantities and sale proceeds — and then compare those dates with the Helsing financing.
That would get us considerably closer to the actual money trail.
The SEC filings give us exact numbers:
31 December 2024: Daniel Ek beneficially owned 29,105,267 Spotify ordinary shares.
31 December 2025: he owned 28,625,267 ordinary shares.
Difference: exactly 480,000 shares.
And we can trace a substantial part of those sales
The SEC records show that through D.G.E. Investments, which is indirectly wholly owned by Ek, he sold:
Date Shares Gross proceeds
Jan 8, 60,000 $28.36m
Jan 22 60,000 $29.96m
Feb 5 60,000 $37.30m
Feb 19 50,000 $31.77m
Mar 5 50,000 $28.91m
Mar 19 50,000 $29.13m
Apr 2 50,000 $28.34m
Apr 16 50,000 $28.24m
That’s 430,000 shares sold for approximately US$243.0 million.
Prima Materia led the €600 million Helsing financing in June 2025. Reuters confirms that the round was led by Ek, while the Financial Times reported that it was made through a combination of traditional equity and other financing and included other investors.
So we now have a very real temporal overlap:
July 25, 2024
→ Ek establishes a scheduled Spotify share-sale plan.
November 2024–April 2025
→ Large, regular Spotify share sales begin.
By April 2025
→ At least 430,000 shares from the 2025 sequence had been sold, generating about US$243 million.
June 2025
→ Prima Materia leads the €600m Helsing round.
What we can now say with confidence is:
Ek was systematically converting substantial amounts of his Spotify equity into cash in the months immediately preceding the June 2025 Helsing investment. Daniel Ek isn’t the founder of Helsing. It was founded in 2021 by Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf and Niklas Köhler. Ek became a major investor through Prima Materia, his investment company, and is chairman of Helsing.
Now what I haven’t made clear is that the Helsing is essentially an AI-driven defence/weapons company. It originally began primarily as a software company, but it has expanded into actually building autonomous military systems.
Its major products include:
HX-2 — an AI-enabled strike drone, essentially a loitering munition designed to locate and attack targets. Helsing says it is capable of operating despite GPS interference and can operate in swarms.
HF-1 — an earlier strike-drone system supplied to Ukraine.
Altra — software that connects reconnaissance information with strike systems, allowing operators to coordinate drones and other military assets.
Centaur — AI/autonomy technology for combat aircraft. Helsing has tested it in fighter-aircraft scenarios.
SG-1 + Lura — autonomous underwater gliders and AI software for detecting and identifying underwater objects such as submarines.
Cirra — AI technology for electronic warfare.
CA-1 Europa — an autonomous combat aircraft that Helsing is developing.
Interestingly, the drone company isn’t Swedish at all — it’s German. Daniel Ek’s investment vehicle is Swedish/European, while the defence company itself is headquartered in Munich.
Now this is where it gets that little more interesting because as a part of my research I was able to establish that all number of bands have pulled out for all range of reasons from the Spotify platform and the main one being the disharmony between the creation of music and active warfare. Now obviously once I researched and read all this it put me in a different space about how I feel about Spotify. I don’t agree with wars on any terms whoever is in them or instigating them and obviously this is going to have a further impact on how I think about Spotify and the way it operates. It’s a big business that’s trampling on the little guy it seems and that’s just not me. Lipcrack certainly haven’t done anything which should cause a song to be pulled from its services as it has been with no regard to the long term implications of getting royalty payments which right from the start it’s been very obvious they don’t want to pay anybody operating on the lower tiers of the service, or at least the distributor agreement prevents that. Which brings me up to the next section in terms of figures and who and what is Spotify.
Australia represents roughly 1.2% of Spotify’s global user base. Spotify said in March 2026 that nearly half of Australians use Spotify, and described Australians as among its most engaged listeners globally. That’s because some alleged 9 million Australian’s use Spotify. Here’s some more figures.
Approximate Spotify users by country
One reasonably recent compilation of country-level estimates gives this picture:
Country Estimated monthly users
🇺🇸 United States ~95 million
🇮🇳 India ~70 million
🇧🇷 Brazil ~45 million
🇮🇩 Indonesia ~30 million
🇲🇽 Mexico ~28 million
🇬🇧 United Kingdom ~25 million
🇩🇪 Germany ~22 million
🇫🇷 France ~20 million
🇯🇵 Japan ~18 million
🇵🇭 Philippines ~15 million
🇦🇺 Australia 9+ million
Rest of world Hundreds of millions
The exact numbers should be treated as estimates rather than audited Spotify figures
Daniel Ek’s involvement with Helsing has generated coverage across:
Financial Times — major coverage of the German drone contracts and Helsing’s military procurement.
TechCrunch — several substantial articles, including the €600m investment and Helsing’s drone production.
The Guardian — coverage of Europe’s rapidly expanding autonomous-drone/defence industry, including Helsing.
Wired — coverage of Helsing’s autonomous combat aircraft and Ek’s involvement.
Music Business Worldwide — specifically because of the Spotify connection.
The FADER — similarly covered Ek’s €600m investment.
Swedish media — there has been quite a bit of coverage, including Dagens PS and Dagens Industri, because Ek is Swedish.
Australian/international coverage has also appeared because of the unusual Spotify-to-defence connection.
And the story has continued generating new news in 2026, rather than being a one-off story about his investment. For example, there has been coverage of Germany awarding Helsing major drone contracts, the subsequent reduction of those contracts, US military testing of Helsing drones, and Helsing’s new aircraft systems.
The thing for me that’s interesting about all those figures is the fact that there’s so many countries funding war mechanization through their Spotify account. And while I hadn’t planned to do this, rather than just go on and on about something I find a little questionable, it seems to be a good time to introduce people to Lipcracks new track “Welcome To The Future” which briefly if I were to tie this article to the general feel of the track, it would be a world near its end where droids have risen up against us.
Please enjoy the new track with a purchase at the Lipcrack website and help support independent music.
Music Player
Scroll to the last song in the player and press play.
PS We know this article might seem a little disjointed in places but the information that came from a range of sources including AI. It was very difficult to include everything of relevance and one other important piece of information which didn’t make it into the article because it was just getting too long, was the percentages of stock held in Spotify by the various major labels and the money they made from the venture in stock sales. For me it’s just a small example of not knowing the full story before engaging in the business.