On 19 November 2019, Spotify announced the acquisition of the exclusive rights to The Last Podcast on the Left. Spotify intended to use MightyTV to improve its advertising efforts on the free tier of service. In March 2017, Spotify acquired Sonalytic, an audio detection startup, for an undisclosed amount of money.
- The standalone app was made available to all iOS and Android users in the United States since 4 June 2019.
- In December 2015, Quartz reported that songs in Discover Weekly playlists had been streamed 1.7 billion times.
- In March 2021, Spotify acquired app developer Betty Labs and their live social audio app, Locker Room, On 12 May 2021.
- The Waze partnership allows Waze app users to view directions to destinations within the Spotify app and access their Spotify playlists through the Waze app.
- In 2016, Spotify introduced its Daily Mix feature, which creates playlists of music that a user has previously listened to on the platform.In 2017, Spotify introduced RapCaviar, a hip-hop playlist.
No sound in Telegram Desktop
Swedish labor disputes are also happening at Tesla and Klarna as of 2024update. Spotify recognizes trade unions at its US podcasting subsidiaries The Ringer and Spotify Studios since 2019. In December 2025, over 300 terabytes of files were scraped from Spotify’s servers and uploaded to Anna’s Archive, totalling 86 million songs uploaded from 2007 to July 2025 that account for 37% of all songs and 99.6% of all listens, as well as 256 million rows of song metadata. Spotify supports integration with DJ software, allowing DJs to mix with music streamed from the platform. The testing was very limited in nature and was only available on Spotify’s Android app in the US. Some artists included in this initial test phase were Steve Aoki and the Wombats.
App Functionality
One year later, in 31 cities worldwide, 27,500 musicians joined UMAW’s campaign #JusticeAtSpotify to demand a compensation of one cent per audio stream. The United Musicians and Allied Workers campaigns for a fairer redistribution and compensation system for musicians. In November 2022, Henry Catalini Smith, a Spotify engineer in Malmö, set up the channel #kollektivavtal in the internal company Slack, which means “collective agreement” in Swedish.
Deezer: Music & Podcast Player
In October 2017, Microsoft announced that it would be ending its Groove Music streaming service by December, with all music from users transferring to Spotify as part of a new partnership. Spotify offers DRM-protected audio content, including over 100 million songs and over 7 million podcast titles, from record labels and media companies. In 2016, Spotify was criticized for allegedly making certain artists’ music harder to find than others, as these artists would release their music to the rival streaming service Apple Music before releasing it to Spotify. Spotify has been criticised by artists and producers including Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke, who have argued that Spotify does not fairly compensate musicians, and both withdrew their music from the service. However, there has been some concern about the music streaming platform’s social media features. Before May 2020, all service users were limited to 10,000 songs in their library, after which they would receive an “Epic collection, friend” notification and would not be able to save more music to their library.
In July 2025, several artists joined a boycott of Spotify because Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek raised another $600 million in support of German defense company Helsing through his investment fund. On 26 January, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify after they refused to remove the podcast. This policy was revoked in June because the company deemed the original wording to be too “vague”; they stated that “Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists. Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct”.
Offline Music Player: Muzoff
- In countries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Spotify registered a fall in users in late February, but it has seen a recovery.
- Ek’s initial pitch to Lorentzon was not initially related to music, but rather a way for streaming content such as video, digital films, images or music to drive advertising revenue.
- The company also introduced “Spotify Running”, a feature aimed at improving music while running with music matched to running tempo, and announced that podcasts and videos (“entertainment, news and clips”) would be coming to Spotify, along with “Spotify Originals” content.
- Named the Car Thing, it represents the music-streaming service’s first entry into hardware devices.
- Swedish labor disputes are also happening at Tesla and Klarna as of 2024update.
- Spotify helps place songs campaigned through Discovery Mode on listeners’ personal algorithmic playlists.
In April 2017, they acquired Mediachain, a blockchain startup that had been developing a decentralized database system for managing attribution, and other metadata for media. In a comment to TechCrunch, Spotify said that Seed Scientific’s team would lead an advanced analytics unit within the company, focused on developing data services. On 3 July 2020, cybersecurity firm VPNMentor discovered a database containing 380 million individual records, including the logins and passwords of Spotify users. It was announced later in April that this type of agreement would be extended to indie artists signed to the Merlin Network agency. New reports in April confirmed that Spotify and Universal Music Group had reached an agreement to allow artists part of Universal to limit their new album releases to the Premium service tier for a maximum of two weeks.
On 14 November 2018, the company announced 13 new markets in the MENA region, including the creation of a new Arabic hub and several playlists. It offers some social media features such as messaging, creating profiles, following friends, shared playlists, and creating listening parties called “Jams”. Listen to your favourite songs and discover new music, podcasts and audiobooks with the Spotify app! In doing so, if users chose to listen to one set of these artists’ music, it effectively reduced the number of plays for other musicians. In 2021, a conspiracy theory began to take hold that Spotify was filling its playlists in some genres (including jazz, chill and “peaceful piano”) with stock music attributed to a handful of little-known musicians, mostly Swedish, in an effort to meet demand for background music.
In November 2015, Spotify introduced a “Fan Insights” panel in limited beta form, letting artists and managers access data on monthly listeners, geographical data, demographic information, music preferences and more. Users could purchase tracks from Spotify, which partnered with 7digital to incorporate the feature. In order to balance the expense of licensing audiobooks and music together, the company started a new “bundle” royalty rate to songwriters. That September, Spotify announced that it had paid a total of over $5 billion to the music industry. In May 2016, Spotify announced “Sponsored Playlists”, a monetisation opportunity in which brands can specify the audiences they have in mind, with Spotify matching the marketer with suitable music in a playlist.
Using this, users can perform various actions such as pulling playlists, launching radio stations, playing or pausing songs. Named the Car Thing, it represents the music-streaming service’s first entry into hardware devices. Spotify first announced a voice-activated music-streaming gadget for cars in May 2019. In April 2018, Spotify began to allow Free users to listen on-demand to whatever songs they want for an unlimited number of times, as long as the song is on one of the user’s 15 personalized discovery playlists.
In January 2014, Spotify removed all time limits for Free users on all platforms, including on computers, which previously had a 10-hour monthly listening limit after a 6-month grace period. The post stated that all free members would be limited to ten hours of music streaming per month, and in addition, individual tracks were limited to five plays. Spotify has experimented with different limitations to users’ listening on the Free service tier. Users can refine playlists with additional instructions, such as “more upbeat” or “happier songs”. The tool allows users to generate personalized playlists from text prompts describing genres, moods, artists, activities, or creative ideas like animals, movie characters, colors, or emojis. Discovery Mode allows artists who meet certain criteria and have a Spotify For Artists account to submit qualifying songs for Spotify’s in-house promotion services.
Additional features include the ability to get “verified” status with a blue checkmark on an artist’s profile, receiving artist support from Spotify, customising the profile page with photos and promoting a certain song as their “pick”. In April 2017, the panel was upgraded to leave beta status, renamed as “Spotify for Artists”, and opened to all artists and managers. In March 2009, Spotify began offering music downloads in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. The company was, according to TechCrunch, planning to launch on the stock market in 2017, but in 2017 it was seen as planning on doing the IPO in 2018 to “build up a better balance sheet and work on shifting its business model to improve its margins”. In April 2015, Spotify began another round of fundraising, with a report from The Wall Street Journal stating it was seeking $400 million (equivalent to $515,700,000 in 2024), which would value the company at $8.4 billion (equivalent to $10,831,000,000 in 2024). In February 2010, Spotify received a small investment from Founders Fund, where board member Sean Parker was recruited to assist Spotify in “winning the labels over in the world’s largest music market”.
In 2024, Spotify Wrapped, which has become a key marketing strategy for the company, was criticised for appearing to rely on AI-generated content and producing uninteresting insights. Other artists and podcasters, such as Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Brené Brown, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash, also announced a boycott of Spotify. He explained, “An extension of the internet radio craze of the early 2000s, Spotify would license content from record labels, and then support artists as people listened to their music.” In frostybet casino March 2021, David Dayen argued in The American Prospect that musicians were in peril due to monopolies in streaming services like Spotify. The most commonly perceived error is said to be caused by a lack of diverse scope within curation staff, including overlooking mainstay artists in large genres, potentially causing a categorical homogenization of musical styles; even impacting mainline artists like within hip hop with A Tribe Called Quest. According to some computer science and music experts, various music communities are often ignored or overlooked by music streaming services such as Spotify.
Worldwide, 30,000 musicians have joined the organization UnionOfMusicians (UMAW). Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it temporarily closed its office in Russia and indefinitely suspended all of its services in the country. The company is incorporated in Luxembourg as Spotify Technology S.A., and headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices in 16 countries around the world. For example, Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road and Doja Cat’s Say So started their popularity through Tik Tok but through Spotify playlists had their popularity accelerated.
Spotify gets its content from major record labels as well as independent artists and pays copyright holders royalties for streaming music. In May 2023, Spotify removed tens of thousands of songs, roughly 7% of the tracks uploaded by the Boomy, due to suspected “artificial streaming”, the practice of using online bots to inflate the listening statistics. On October 6, 2025, Spotify announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring music and podcast recommendations inside ChatGPT, allowing Spotify users to discover and queue new music through conversations, rather than search. In March 2017, Spotify announced a partnership with the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference for 2017, presenting specific content in special playlists through an SXSW hub in Spotify’s apps. In December 2021, Spotify acquired Whooshkaa, a podcast tech company that develops specialized technology that allows radio broadcasters to easily turn their existing audio content into on-demand podcast programming.
In December 2013, CEO Daniel Ek announced that Android and iOS smartphone users with the free service tier could listen to music in Shuffle mode, a feature in which users can stream music by specific artists and playlists without being able to pick which songs to hear. Later that month, Spotify also acquired MightyTV, an app connected to television streaming services, including Netflix and HBO Go, that recommends content to users. The company also introduced “Spotify Running”, a feature aimed at improving music while running with music matched to running tempo, and announced that podcasts and videos (“entertainment, news and clips”) would be coming to Spotify, along with “Spotify Originals” content.
