Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT) is cooling after surpassing $500 per share and a $100 billion market cap.
Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT) is cooling after surging past $500 per share – and a $100 billion market cap. But insiders are continuing to cash in, and analysts are speculating about SPOT’s trajectory heading into 2025.
At the time of writing, Spotify shares were hovering around $470 apiece, down about 2.6% on the day but still up approximately 149% from the year’s beginning. Moreover, it was only earlier in December that SPOT topped $500 for the first time, thereby elevating the music, podcast, and video platform’s market cap past the mentioned $100 billion mark.
We’ve explored the growing discrepancy between Spotify’s market cap and those of the major record labels throughout 2024. And to reiterate the obvious, despite the platform’s increasingly aggressive diversification, major-signed acts’ works continue to play an essential role (and claim a clear-cut majority of music revenue) on Spotify.
But you wouldn’t necessarily know as much from a review of the near-term numbers, referring to the majors’ subscription revenue growth percentages (which, in general, have declined in recent quarters) and stock prices.
As things stand, Warner Music stock (NASDAQ: WMG) is down about 10% YTD at $32.34 per share, compared to a roughly 9% slide for Universal Music shares (Euronext: UMG) at $24.77/€23.54 a pop. (UMG’s falloff is larger yet when factoring from the 52-week high.)
That means the combined market value of these leading music companies is almost $33 billion smaller than Spotify’s even in the wake of the above-highlighted SPOT dip. Regarding where the caps will proceed from here, it goes without saying that multiple factors, a portion related to operations and others concerning broader market trends, are in play.
But moving forward, it’ll be worth monitoring the non-music expansions of Spotify as well as its efforts to remain profitable. Following years of questionable buyouts and sizable losses, the business’s newfound focus on staying consistently in the black has been a key contributor to SPOT’s ascent.
The likes of longtime SPOT holder Rowan Street Capital have laid out their bullish visions for Spotify stock in recent weeks. While many fair-weather analysts have made a habit of altering their forecasts in tandem with Spotify stock’s ups and downs – not necessarily changes to the company’s fundamentals – some have been long Spotify for years now.
This includes Worm Capital and The Guardian Fund, the latter of which predicted in early 2021 that SPOT would top about $1,750 by 2030.
Closer to the present, a number of Spotify execs and insiders sold shares in mid-November after a post-Q3-earnings stock-price surge. We promptly covered the selloffs, but several of the individuals proceeded to keep on cashing out during the remainder of the month and early December, regulatory filings show.
Those SPOT transactions refer to $10,355,038 worth of stock-option shares sold by CTO Gustav Söderström on November 20th; 75,000 more shares sold by CEO Daniel Ek for $34,787,250 on the same day; and 75,000 additional shares, valued this time at $36,103,500, moved by Ek on the 26th.
Not stopping there, Ek kicked off December by (you guessed it) parting with 75,000 shares valued at $36,999,000, filings indicate. Also on the 4th, public-affairs head Dustee Jenkins enjoyed a $5,217,230 windfall by moving 10,399 stock-option shares.