Spotify
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Regeringsgatan 19, 111 53 Stockholm, Sweden
Spotify is a Swedish freemium music streaming service provider founded in April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. As of March 2026, it was one of the largest providers of music streaming services, with over 777 million monthly active users comprising 300 million paying subscribers. Spotify is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts. Wikipedia
Website: spotify.com
Symbol: NYSE:SPOT
Owns
About Spotify
Since its launch in 2008, Spotify has revolutionized music listening. Our move into podcasting brought innovation and a new generation of listeners to the medium. In 2022, we took the next leap, entering the fast-growing audiobook market—continuing to shape the future of audio. Today, more listeners than ever can discover, manage and enjoy over 100 million tracks, 7 million podcast titles, and 500,000 audiobooks in select markets on Spotify. We are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 761 million users, including 293 million subscribers across 184 markets.
Latest news
- Sep 7: Opinion: We've covered companies sending these sorts of things before. Where a photograph for a thumbnail has been used under licence from a publisher, then our legal advice (and the advice of stock image libraries that we asked) is that this use should be covered by the publisher's licence: even if a resized/cached copy of an image by a directory is made for privacy or technical purposes; there is some US case law to that effect. But - a slow hand-clap to the German dpa, who it appears may succeed in closing the only German podcast directory, giving more control to the US-run directories of Spotify, Apple and Podcast Index which are outside their legal jurisdiction. We've asked dpa for comment: they haven't replied.
- Sep 4: On Tuesday we reported about a podcast removed from Spotify in August last year because it contained some (fully-licensed) music. Today - an email from Spotify to the podcaster: "Thank you for your patience while we have taken another look at your appeal. Upon review, and with apologies, we have concluded that our original decision was incorrect." Result!
- Sep 1: East Coast Studio was just celebrating its Cassette Culture podcast's finalist spot in the UK's Independent Podcast Awards, when Spotify pulled the entire podcast from its platform - for ten weeks. Why? Spotify pulls shows with lots of music - even if you have a licence (it's in the terms) - and Spotify's robots disagreed with the music in just one episode of this show, yanking the whole lot. Host Martin Franklin warns us not to rely on one particular platform: and be careful which embedded players you use.
- Aug 24: We've had more email about Megaphone woes. One large publisher tells us: "We've experienced a complete outage of ad plays, ads repeating back-to-back and who knows what else we haven't discovered yet. We've had to re-write orders and move ads to different ad slots to get them to play. Discovering and remediating these issues has been an entirely manual process, with little active support from Megaphone. This not only costs the industry ad dollars but also redirects countless hours of labor toward remediation." Another publisher tells us: "It was a bad summer working for Spotify and their Megaphone support team (unpaid) while we spent a month asking why things were not delivering. We learned we could no longer have the same order run in multiple countries - each would require its own order. A true pain for those along the border in the Canada and USA who still want to market to one another. One Star Spotify Summer. Do not recommend." We've approached the company for comment.
- Aug 20: Returning to our top story: and Podnews will call the company out by name: it's Megaphone. Yesterday, we covered issues that some publishers have had with Megaphone: bugs and breaking changes without documentation that have left publishers scrambling to catch issues. Today, we've evidence that competitive separation - which is now unilaterally enforced by Megaphone - means for some niche shows, different ads are fighting with themselves to be heard (or, fighting with network ads sold by Spotify). For example - if you're a financial podcast, and you have two financial services advertisers, these new rules mean they'll not be allowed in the same ad break, irrespective of what you want as a publisher. However, a workaround to change one advertiser's category doesn't work, because, says Megaphone support, "there is an active bug where existing campaigns continue to carry their previously set advertiser category". (This isn't documented).
Data credits: Google Maps, Podnews newsletter, Wikipedia