Spotify founders enriched to the tune of US$5.8b in listing
Daniel Ek speaks during a media event in New York, U.S., May 20,2015.
NEW YORK - Spotify Technology's stock debut just made itsfounders two of Sweden's richest people.
Chief executive officer Daniel Ek, 35, is worth US$2.4 billionthanks to his 9 per cent economic stake in the music-streamingservice. Co-founder Martin Lorentzon, 49, gains a US$3.4 billionfortune from his 12 per cent holding, according to the BloombergBillionaires Index.
On its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange onTuesday, the music streaming service finished with a valuation ofUS$26.5 billion. The share price closed at US$149.01, up 12.9 percent from a reference price of US$132 set by the NYSE.
Since launching its streaming music service in 2008, theStockholm-founded company has overcome heavy initial resistancefrom big record labels and among some major music artists totransform how the industry makes money.
Its stock market debut marks the coming of age of the firstEuropean company to emerge as a global Internet player capable offending off rivals among the US internet giants. It also marks therevival of music as a stock market investment theme after adecade-long drought in which music companies were absorbed intomedia conglomerates.
Spotify was founded in 2006 as a peer-to-peer file sharingservice by serial Swedish entrepreneurs Ek and Lorentzon. Ek'soriginal idea morphed into offering a legal service that is "betterthan piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry",he told The Telegraph in 2010.
In 2008, the company publicly launched its Spotify service,offering listeners access to a vast library of recordings ratherthan making users pay for CDs or downloads of albums or tracks. Themusic industry, then suffering from devastating consumer spendingdeclines, resisted Spotify's promise of "unlimited access" to musicin favour of the then current fashion of selling digital downloadsbased on the Apple iTunes model.
