Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos joins Spotify board
Ted Sarandos, Netflix Inc. chief content officer, will join Spotify Ltd.’s board to oversee the world’s largest paid music-streaming service.
Netflix’s Ted Sarandos joins Spotify board
As Spotify prepares to go public next year, Sarandos, who oversees production and acquisition of programming, will join the group which includes chairman and co-founder Martin Lorentzon, Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, and others.
In 2015, the company raised a $526m round of funding with leads that include TeliaSonera AB, Goldman Sachs via its Global Private Opportunity Partners fund and British, as well as Canadian, hedge funds. In the same year, Spotify named ex-Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy as the chief financial officer after joining the board in 2014 and giving up his seat after his appointment.
Spotify is working to restructure music around on-demand streaming, which has caught on with 39m paying subscribers — more than double the number of subscribers that competitor Apple Music has. However, Spotify is still working to turn a profit as it struggles to shift listeners from its free, ad-supported product to the paid service. The company returned 84 per cent of sales to rights holders last year.
In addition to streaming music, Spotify has also been working with video, including a four-part documentary series with Metallica called Landmark - Metallica: The Early Years.