Spotify sells 2/3rds of its DistroKid shares for $167M

Spotify has sold 2/3rds of its investment in D.I.Y. music distributor DistroKid for $153 million. That’s a 13X return on investment in just the last 20 months.

Today’s Spotify financial filing revealed that its stake in Distrokid was worth $18.5 million USD in January 2020 and increased to $57 million by January 2021.

By October 1 of this year when Spotify sold two-thirds of its DistroKid shares for $167 million, the total value of Spotify’s initial investment had risen 13X to $238 million.

Flat fee DIY distributor DistroKid serves more than 2 million artists and claims to handle one-third of the new music uploaded to DSPs daily. But the real confirmation of its financial value came this August when Insight Partners made a new investment in DistroKid at a valuation of $1.3 billion.

MORE: Spotify has 381M monthly users as subscribers grow 19% in strong Q3 2021

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.