Who Owns Epidemic Sound?

Epidemic Sound was founded in Stockholm in 2009 by a founding group that combined music production and technology expertise. Peer Astrom and David Stenmarck are established music producers; Oscar Hoglund and Jan Zachrisson brought business and platform expertise; Hjalmar Winbladh is a serial Swedish entrepreneur who became the company's long-term chairman.

The founding insight was structural. Conventional music licensing was designed for broadcast media and could not serve the emerging creator economy, where a YouTuber needed legal music for a video uploaded in hours. Epidemic built a model around catalog ownership: it commissioned and bought music outright from artists, then licensed the owned catalog to subscribers on simple terms that covered platform use without per-use royalty claims.

The model grew with YouTube. Through the 2010s the platform became the default music source for professional creators, whose uploads generated billions of daily plays carrying its catalog. Its Swedish base placed it inside the same music production ecosystem that produced the country's outsized share of global pop composition.

Institutional investment marked its scaling phase. Creandum was an early backer. EQT took a major stake in 2019 at a reported €370 million valuation, and in 2021 a funding round including Blackstone Growth and EQT Growth valued the company at approximately $1.4 billion.

Revenue reached SEK 1.92 billion in 2024, up 29 percent, with adjusted EBITDA tripling to SEK 147 million. In 2025 reported revenue was SEK 1,828 million, down 5 percent on currency effects but up 3 percent in constant currencies, with the group deliberately investing in AI transformation at negative EBITDA margin. The first half of 2026 returned the business to profitable growth at a 10 percent adjusted EBITDA margin.