When Spotify arrived in the U.S. in 2011, streaming was a $600 million business, accounting for 4% of the recording industry’s annual global revenue on.forbes.com/6010Jm2re 
In 2020, streaming services delivered $13.4 billion in sales, representing 62% of industry revenue. Last year, Spotify paid out $5 billion to rights holders, mostly the big labels, which passed along an estimated $500 million of that to recording artists
“Let’s be real,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says. “I had no idea Spotify’s cultural and monetary impact would ever be this big.”
Now he wants to go even bigger. Let other media behemoths battle for eyeballs; Spotify is going after the world’s eardrums. “Everyone underestimates audio. It should be a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry,” Ek says. “Audio is ours to win.”
Learn more on how Spotify plans to move beyond music and become the Instagram and TikTok of audio on.forbes.com/6010Jm2re #ForbesUnder30
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