DOI RECORD
From Streaming to Warfare: Capital Origin, Public Narratives, and Legitimacy Contestation in European DefenceTech Investment
Abstract
In June 2025, Prima Materia, the investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, led a €600 million funding round for Helsing, a European defence technology company developing AI-enabled military systems. Musicians protested, seeing it as platform-derived wealth flowing into military technology. This paper examines how actors across the defence, venture, and cultural-platform arenas construct the legitimacy of Prima Materia’s investment in Helsing and how its public association with Daniel Ek and Spotify shapes those judgments. Drawing on thematic narrative analysis of 26 media articles published from 1 June to 1 October 2025, the paper identifies four narratives and a cross-cutting accountability dispute. Security and growth narratives framed the investment as legitimate through its anticipated strategic and commercial uses. Cultural-integrity and value-conversion narratives constructed it as illegitimate by attributing the capital to musical labour and treating its deployment into military technology as morally inappropriate. The findings show how attributed capital provenance became a basis for legitimacy contestation across social domains. Cultural-platform actors used this provenance to claim standing to judge the capital’s deployment despite formal organisational separation. The case shows how private capital entering military technology becomes publicly contestable under geopolitical turbulence, generating struggles over who may shape military technological futures and on what moral terms.