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.

Trending Music Player

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.

Premium-exclusive albums

Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, discussed “what he called an artist-friendly streaming solution”. However, artists such as Gary Glitter and Lostprophets are still hidden from Spotify’s radio stations. In May 2018, Spotify attracted criticism for its “Hate Content & Hateful Conduct policy” that removed the music of R. A study has shown that record labels keep a high amount of the money earned from Spotify, and the CEO of Merlin Network, a representative body for over 10,000 independent labels, has also observed significant yearly growth rates in earnings from Spotify, while clarifying that Spotify pays labels, not artists. The free service tier has led to a variety of major album releases being delayed or withdrawn from the service.
In February 2020, Spotify announced it would be featuring new songwriter pages and ‘written by’ playlists. In June 2017, Variety reported that Spotify would announce “Secret Genius”, a new initiative aimed at highlighting songwriters and producers, and the effect those people have on the music industry and the artists’ careers. On 1 July 2019, Spotify deprecated the program and announced plans to stop accepting direct uploads by the end of that month and eventually remove all content uploaded in this manner. Uploading was free and artists received 100% of the revenue from songs they uploaded; artists were able frostybet casino to control when their release went public. The feature was rolled out to a small number of US-based artists by invitation only. In September 2018, Spotify announced “Upload Beta”, allowing artists to upload directly to the platform instead of going through a distributor or record label.

Demus: Easy Music Streaming

The aim was to help users to listen to the music they want without information overload or spending time building their own playlists. The ability to purchase and download music tracks via the app was removed on 4 January 2013. Another source of income was music purchases from within the app, however this service was removed in January 2013. In September 2025, Spotify began removing restrictions preventing free users from listening to specific tracks. In November 2018, Spotify announced it was opening up Spotify Connect to all of the users using its Free service, however, these changes still required products supporting Spotify Connect to support the latest software development kit.
It also said that Apple believed Spotify users on the app store were Apple’s customers and not Spotify’s. In March 2023, Spotify announced a partnership with Patreon, which Spotify claimed would “enable creators to expand their creative business through direct payments from fans, and allow fans to listen to their Patreon content on Spotify”. In May 2022, Spotify announced a partnership with the online game platform and game creation system Roblox, the partnership saw Spotify as the first streaming brand to have a presence within the game with the launch of “Spotify Island”.

• On 26 January, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify after they refused to remove the podcast.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”.
• On 5 February 2020, Spotify announced its intent to acquire Bill Simmons’ sports and pop culture blog and podcast network The Ringer for an undisclosed amount.
• PlayStation Music incorporates the Spotify service into Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles, and Sony Xperia mobile devices.

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In 2023, Spotify launched additional features to help independent artists distributing their music on the platform reach a wider array of potential fans. This feature allows two or more Premium users in the same location to share control over the music that is being played. 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. In August 2016, Spotify launched Release Radar, a personalized playlist that allows users to stay up-to-date on new music released by the artists they listen to the most.
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.
The changes faced a mixed reaction from the music industry, who believed that it would be detrimental to emerging musicians, but would make a larger share of total royalty payments available to musicians. In 2013, Spotify revealed that it paid artists an average of $0.007 per stream. Spotify for Artists states that the company does not have a fixed per-play rate; instead, it considers factors such as the user’s home country and the individual artist’s royalty rate.
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). In September 2025, Lossless audio, which allows Spotify users to listen to songs in very high quality, became available through Spotify premium. Months later, Spotify tested its own version of stories (the sharing format popularized by social apps) known as “Storyline”, and the focus is on allowing artists to share their own insights, inspiration, details about their creative process or other meanings behind the music. A camera icon in the apps’ search fields lets other users point their device’s camera at the code, which takes them to the same content.

Spotify for Creators

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.

• 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 December 2015, Spotify debuted Spotify Wrapped, a program that creates playlists based on each user’s most listened-to songs from the year.
• 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.
• Spotify also announced that the third season of WNYC Studios’ 2 Dope Queens podcast would premiere with a two-week exclusivity period on the service on 21 March 2017.
• The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports.

Songs, Playlists & Audiobooks

The WNYC Studios partnership brought various podcasts from WNYC to Spotify, including Note to Self, On the Media and Here’s the Thing. In October 2022, Spotify acquired the Dublin-based content moderation startup, Kinzen. In July 2022, Spotify acquired Heardle, a Wordle-inspired music trivia game, for an undisclosed amount; Heardle was shut down in May 2023. Armchair Expert announced on Instagram that the podcast would be available exclusively on Spotify beginning 1 July, saying they would continue to maintain the same creative control over the show after the move. In March 2021, Spotify acquired app developer Betty Labs and their live social audio app, Locker Room, On 12 May 2021. 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).
Spotify operates under a freemium business model (basic services are free, while additional features are offered via paid subscriptions). Though all three applications support real-time stem separation and mixing, this functionality is disabled on music streamed from Spotify. In December 2024, Harper’s Magazine released a report stating that Spotify was padding out playlists with ghost artists created by production companies in order to minimise royalty costs and increase profits. In May 2022, Spotify began testing a feature that would allow select artists to promote their NFTs via their profiles. However, after talking it out and renewing the contracts between the two, Spotify later announced that they had reached an agreement with Kakao Entertainment, allowing their content to be available once again on the platform across the globe. On 1 March 2021, Spotify confirmed that its platform would no longer have access to music from artists represented by Kakao Entertainment.