In July 2025, a leak containing the listening data of several politicians, journalists, and businesspeople, titled the Panama Playlists, was released online. According to journalist and author Liz Pelly, Spotify, “under the guise of AI-powered recommendations has developed a surveillance apparatus driven by emotion profiling and pseudoscience.” Spotify does not sell user data but did begin selling broader trend data, often coined “streaming intelligence” to marketing firms in 2016, allowing for the data to be available directly to clients. Helsing is an AI defense software company that also engages in military strike drone manufacturing. Spotify promised to add content advisories for anything containing discussions related to COVID-19 and posted additional rules.
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Spotify provides access to over 100 million songs, 5 million podcasts, and 4 billion playlists. Unlike the apps, the web player does not have the ability to download music for offline listening. Spotify also offers a proprietary protocol known as “Spotify Connect”, which lets frostybet casino users listen to music through a wide range of entertainment systems, including speakers, receivers, TVs, cars, and smartwatches. The company said users would be able to login into the main Spotify app with their Stations account and transfer their stations into Spotify.
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- This was followed in May 2017 with the acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Niland, which uses technology to improve personalisation and recommendation features for users.
- This eligibility rule only applies to royalties for sound recordings, not musical compositions.
- On 19 May 2020, Spotify acquired exclusive rights to stream the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience beginning in September of that year, under an agreement valued at around US$100 million (equivalent to $119,100,000 in 2024).
- 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.
- Spotify users can also ‘jam’ sessions where users can create and contribute live music playing sessions with their Spotify friends.
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 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.
- Two days later, Apple responded, stating that the claim was misleading rhetoric and that Spotify wanted benefits of a free app without being a free app.
- Moreover, they are asking for a fairer redistribution system, as smaller artists are disproportionately disadvantaged on Spotify.
- In July 2022, Spotify acquired Heardle, a Wordle-inspired music trivia game, for an undisclosed amount; Heardle was shut down in May 2023.
- In April 2011, Spotify announced via a blog post that they would drastically cut the amount of music that free members could access, effective 1 May 2011.
- In September 2025, Spotify began removing restrictions preventing free users from listening to specific tracks.
- In March 2016, Spotify launched six playlists branded as Fresh Finds, including the main playlist and Fire Emoji, Basement, Hiptronix, Six Strings, and Cyclone (hip-hop, electronic, pop, guitar-driven, and experimental music respectively).
- The features were announced by CEO Daniel Ek at a press conference, with Ek saying that a common user complaint about the service was that “Spotify is great when you know what music you want to listen to, but not when you don’t”.
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”.
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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.
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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.
In February 2021, Spotify announced their plans to introduce a HiFi subscription, to offer listening in high fidelity, lossless sound quality. This eligibility rule only applies to royalties for sound recordings, not musical compositions. Some of the premium options users may choose from include individual, duo, family, and student.
While the streaming music industry in general faces the same critique about inadequate payments, Spotify, being the leading service, faces particular scrutiny due to its free service tier, allowing users to listen to music for free, though with advertisements between tracks. In May 2017, Spotify introduced Spotify Codes for its mobile apps, a way for users to share specific artists, tracks, playlists or albums with other people. Today, royalties on all streaming services, including Spotify are paid on a per user basis not per stream as this allows the artists who users listen to the most to receive the largest percentage of the payouts.
Spotify helps place songs campaigned through Discovery Mode on listeners’ personal algorithmic playlists. The feature is represented by a bell icon on the app’s main page and is available on iOS and Android. In July 2021, Spotify launched the “What’s New” feed, a section that collects all new releases and episodes from artists and podcasts that the user follows. In December 2015, Quartz reported that songs in Discover Weekly playlists had been streamed 1.7 billion times. The functionality is limited to selected playlists and was only available on Spotify’s iOS app at launch, being expanded to the Android app in April 2017. In May 2015, Spotify announced a new “Home” start-page that could recommend music.
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.
In June 2022, Spotify acquired Sonantic, a synthetic voice and video developer. Also the same month, Spotify bought the exclusive rights to the Call Her Daddy podcast. In November 2020, Spotify announced plans to acquire Megaphone from The Slate Group for US$235 million.
It distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders (often record labels), who then pay artists based on individual agreements. Unlike physical or download sales, which pay artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed. As of 2022, Spotify is the current sponsor of Spanish football club FC Barcelona, with music artists like Drake, Travis Scott, and Ed Sheeran collaborating with the club by changing their shirts into their artist logo, sometimes used for album promotions. Users can search for music based on artist, album, or genre, and can create, edit, and share playlists. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports.
If a song is “loved”, a custom radio channel will be created based on it, and when there are at least 15 of these songs, a “My Favourites” channel is unlocked. At launch, the skipping feature was not featured to “reinforce the feel of radio”, but it was quietly added later and with no limits. In October 2017, Spotify launched “Rise”, a program aimed at promoting emerging artists.
