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When Spotify goes public, it should be very good for these 8 people and investors

These are the early employees and investors in Swedish music streaming service Spotify that will get big windfalls after its IPO.

  • Spotify is preparing to become a public company.
  • This will be very good for a number of Spotify executives and investors who own a lot of shares.
  • Here's a list of the biggest shareholders in Spotify who stand to get rich (or get richer) if the stock does well.

Global music streaming service Spotify just filed the paperwork to list its shares for sale to the public using an unusual method called a direct listing. Should its stock fare well, Spotify's founders, executives and major investors should do quite well.

We don't know yet how much money Spotify hopes its shares to sell at, so we don't know how many millions Spotify will bring each of these people or investment firms. Spotify will price its shares closer to its first day of trading.

But we do know who owns a lot of shares and who stands to get a windfall, thanks to its IPO documents filed with the SEC.

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Here are the biggest potential winners from the Spotify IPO:

Daniel Ek, 35, is the company's co-founder CEO and the face of Spotify. He currently owns 25% of the company and nearly 47 million shares. Those shares will be worth more than $1 billion if Spotify trades at $22 per share or more.

Wealth is nothing new to Ek. He's been a self-made millionaire for over a decade now after selling his first company, ad tech startup Advertigo, at age 23 for $1.25 million.

After that sale, he bought fancy cars, wooed women and wound up feeling empty and depressed he later admitted.

That's when he started thinking about doing something next with his life, had long talks with Swedish businessman Martin Lorentzon where they envisioned creating a way to allow people to have better access to all of the world's music. And here we are at Spotify's IPO.

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Martin Lorentzon, 48, co-founder and director and former chairman, is the next biggest shareholder. He owns 13% of the company, just under 24 million shares.

Lorentzon's first partnership with Ek was when the ad network company he founded, Tradedoubler acquired Ek's company Advertigo in 2006 and made the young Ek a millionaire.

Investor Sony Music Entertainment International owns over 10 million shares. Its investment deal, and the royalties it made from sharing its huge catalog of music with Spotify, was the source of some dispute. 19 artists including sued Sony over it, alleging they weren't getting their fair share of money Spotify was paying Sony.

There are a number of other well-known people who will also benefit with Spotify's IPO because they are serving on Spotify's board. This includes Padmasree Warrior, former star engineer at Cisco and current CEO of NIO US (a Chinese electric car company); Nike exec Heidi O’Neill and Netflix exec Ted Sarandos.

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