Spotify head Daniel Ek, who’s contributed to the roughly $1.25 billion worth of company stock sold by execs during 2024. Photo Credit: Spotify
It’s a happy holiday season indeed for Spotify execs and insiders, who cashed in on a staggering $1.25 billion worth of company stock during 2024.
That sizable Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT) selloff total just recently emerged in a report from the Financial Times, which calculated the sum via the relevant SEC filings. Drawing from those same documents, we’ve reported on huge insider trades throughout 2024 – including many millions of dollars’ worth of SPOT sales from Daniel Ek and others during December.
Unsurprisingly, the transactions arrived against the backdrop of continued valuation growth for Spotify stock. Though shares recently cooled from their astonishing all-time-high price of $506 apiece, they still finished at $461.64 each today, for a nearly 145% surge since the top of 2024.
Seemingly reflecting investors’ growing confidence in Spotify amid a push for profitability and an aggressive emphasis on savings, the latter price is also close to six times larger than SPOT’s value back in December 2022.
In other words, a lot’s changed for the company across the past two years, and the time is evidently right for insiders to cash in. Returning to the mentioned FT breakdown, Spotify execs and board members parted with $1.25 billion or so in shares on the year, with about $900 million attributable to transactions from co-founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon.
(November saw Lorentzon move $383 million or so worth of Spotify stock in one fell swoop – meaning that, along with Ek’s aforesaid sales, a substantial portion of the sum derived from recent transactions.)
While it perhaps goes without saying in light of SPOT’s ascent, it’ll be interesting to see where the stock – and the company – trends in the new year. As things stand, non-audio entertainment is a bigger focus than ever at the video-minded business, which is further doubling down on AI, advertising offerings, and more.
Also worth closely monitoring are trends throughout the wider music streaming landscape. In a nutshell, the major labels, despite providing content that’s decidedly important to Spotify’s core offering, didn’t exactly fly high on the year from a streaming-growth perspective.
To be sure, signs of slowing subscription revenue growth emerged at Universal Music and elsewhere during 2024, and the possibility of outright subscriber declines is now taking shape.
Of course, the majors aren’t sitting idly by and accepting the less-than-ideal results; possible solutions have emerged in dialing back the Family Plan’s discount, retooling artist-royalty models, leaning even more aggressively into superfan initiatives, and, adjacent to the latter, encouraging the launch of higher-priced plans.
Lastly, Universal Music and Amazon Music yesterday announced a significantly expanded partnership deal designed to usher in the “new era in music streaming.” As part of the “artist-centric” pact, UMG will assist Amazon Music in “accelerating growth of their service,” the companies spelled out.