Spotify helps place songs campaigned through Discovery Mode on listeners’ personal algorithmic playlists. 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. It combines short-form podcast news updates from The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and PRI with a mix of a user’s favorite songs and artists interspersed with tracks the listener has yet to discover. 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 September 2025, Lossless audio, which allows Spotify users to listen to songs in very high quality, became available through Spotify premium.
- It also said that Apple believed Spotify users on the app store were Apple’s customers and not Spotify’s.
- In December, Spotify and Tencent’s music arm, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), agreed to swap stakes and make an investment in each other’s music businesses.
- 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.
- 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.
- Following Google’s corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet’s Access division.
- Select albums would be available only on the Premium tier for a period of time, before general release.
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- Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s internet properties and interests.
- These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company’s tools, including AI technology.
- The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company.
- In June 2022, Spotify acquired Sonantic, a synthetic voice and video developer.
- Spotify launched in the United States in July 2011, and offered a six-month, ad-supported trial period, during which new users could listen to an unlimited amount of music for free.
Google became Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed.
After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as “Google”), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. 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. Pelly advocated for a move away from the current royalty model that says the artists who people listen to the most should make the most money toward a more generalized approach where the decision for who gets paid rests with industry or government bodies, not audiences. 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 14 November 2018, the company announced 13 new markets in the MENA region, including the creation of a new Arabic hub and several playlists. While certain musicians laud the service for offering a lawful option to combat piracy and for remunerating artists each time their music is played, others have voiced objections to Spotify’s royalty structure and its effect on record sales. Israel expressed apprehension that the data transferred to the cloud services of these global corporations might be accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies. This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. 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 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”. Spotify became profitable for the first time in 2024 with a net profit of €1.14 billion ($1.17 billion). Years after growth and expansion, a November 2012 report suggested strong momentum for the company. In 2008, just after launch, the company made a loss of 31.8 million Swedish kronor (US$4.4 million).
Direct public offering
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. Of that amount, about 58.5% of its total revenue goes to the owners of sound recording copyrights, and the other 12% goes to the owners of musical compositions.
Grunderwerbsteueraufkommen 2024: September mit Rückgang auf 81,7 Mio. Euro
Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu. The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position. Google’s other ventures outside of internet services and consumer electronics include quantum computing (Willow, Google Quantum AI), self-driving cars (Waymo), and transformer models (Google DeepMind). Many of these products and services are dominant in their respective industries, as is Google Search. Not available to users who have already tried Premium.
Also in January 2019, Spotify beta-tested its Canvas feature, where artists or labels can upload looping 3 to 8-second moving visuals to their tracks, replacing album covers in the “Now Playing” view; users have the option to turn off this feature. 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. The applications provided features such as synchronised lyrics, music reviews, and song recommendations. In November 2011, Spotify introduced a Spotify Apps service that made it possible for third-party developers to design applications that could be hosted within the Spotify computer software. Spotify provides access to over 100 million songs, 5 million podcasts, and 4 billion playlists.
Company
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. Spotify stated that Sonalytic would be used to improve the company’s personalized playlists, better match songs with compositions, and improve the company’s publishing data system. 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. In June 2015, Spotify announced they had acquired Seed Scientific, a data science consulting firm and analytics company.
Social Media
Google reportedly said “the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service.” In July 2025, the U.S. The partnership between Google and Saudi Arabia includes collaboration with key stakeholders, such as the Public Investment Fund (PIF), to develop AI applications that will benefit sectors like healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and logistics. In November 2024, Google announced the establishment of a new AI hub in Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom’s economic growth and technological development as part of its Vision 2030 initiative. The EU Court of Justice found that Google’s treatment of rival shopping searches, which the court referred to as “discriminatory”, was in violation of the Digital Markets Act. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), based in Luxembourg, also found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying a €2.4 billion fine.
Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, generating $38 billion the previous year. For the 2006 fiscal felice bet year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google’s holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.update
The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In September 2025 Google opened their £735m AI Centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and announced their plans for £5 bn investment in AI research, in the same month that Alphabet reached market capitalisation of $3 trillion. The new campus, reported to be the company’s largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees.
The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, 1,700,000-square-foot (160,000 m2) headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan’s Hudson Square neighborhood. In March 2018, Google’s parent company Alphabet bought the nearby Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion. In 2021, court documents revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian to “convince them (employees) that unions suck”. Google had previously been accused of surveilling and firing employees who were suspected of organizing a workers union. The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture. The coalition is made up of “13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland”.
Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search. These centers, which will be built in Columbus and Lancaster, will power up the company’s tools, including AI technology. In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional data centers in Ohio. In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google’s capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.