Spotify users can also ‘jam’ sessions where users can create and contribute live music playing sessions with their Spotify friends. Spotify also has a ‘blend’ feature in which two users’ music preferences are mixed in a shared playlist. In April 2014, Spotify moved away from the peer-to-peer (P2P) system they had used to distribute music to users. Spotify’s terms and conditions do not permit users to reverse-engineer the application. Ek stated that «We’re giving people the best free music experience in the history of the smartphone.» This limitation does not apply to Android and iOS tablets, or computers.
In Spotify’s apps, music can be browsed or searched for via various parameters, such as artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label. Spotify also offers a proprietary protocol known as «Spotify Connect», which lets 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. 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.

Google around the globe

  • 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.
  • The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes.
  • 700 employees have since joined Unionen, with another 100 each joining Engineers of Sweden and Akavia.
  • Users can refine playlists with additional instructions, such as «more upbeat» or «happier songs».
  • 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.
  • Spotify operates under a freemium business model (basic services are free, while additional features are offered via paid subscriptions).
  • Some of the premium options users may choose from include individual, duo, family, and student.

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.

Gemini 3 Flash: Bring any idea to life faster

The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The first use of the verb on television appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company.
In January 2021, Spotify made a selection of audiobooks available on the platform as a test of developing a greater breadth of content for users. Spotify thereafter announced it was planning to add more of these pages and playlists to highlight songwriters. 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.

Financial services

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.

  • The testing was very limited in nature and was only available on Spotify’s Android app in the US.
  • 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.
  • 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 November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs.
  • In September 2025, Spotify began removing restrictions preventing free users from listening to specific tracks.
  • 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.

Consumer services

Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019. In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by «imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites» that required them to exclude search results from Google’s rivals.
The aim was to help users to listen to the music they want without information overload or spending time building their own playlists. Spotify gets its content from major record labels as well as independent artists and pays copyright holders royalties for streaming music. 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.
On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In June 2022, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. Google called these proposals excessive and harmful to consumers, pledging to appeal.
In a 2022 National Labor Relations Board ruling, court documents suggested that Google sponsored a secretive project—Project Vivian—to counsel its employees and to discourage them from forming unions. Also in February 2022, Google announced a $100 million fund to expand skills training and job placement for low-income Americans, in conjunction with non-profits Year Up, Social Finance, and Merit America. felice bet The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees. Responding to the humanitarian crisis after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google announced a $15 million donation to support Ukrainian citizens. In March 2007, in partnership with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Google hosted the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival at its headquarters in Mountain View. Google continued to monetize and profit from sites propagating climate disinformation even after the company updated their policy to prohibit placing their ads on similar sites.
In a lawsuit filed January 8, 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against a class defined by their «conservative political views, male gender, and/or … Caucasian or Asian race». In 2013, a class action against several Silicon Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged «no cold call» agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees. Some of Google’s services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense, originated from these independent endeavors.

Listening limitations

Later that month, Spotify also acquired MightyTV, an app connected to television streaming services, including Netflix and HBO Go, that recommends content to users. 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. 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. In May 2017, Google enabled a new «Personal» tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts’ various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos. 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. In March 2021, David Dayen argued in The American Prospect that musicians were in peril due to monopolies in streaming services like Spotify.

Search Through Time

Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. While Waze would remain an independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google’s own mapping service. Schmidt was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company’s full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo! After some additional small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.
Select albums would be available only on the Premium tier for a period of time, before general release. The Financial Times reported in March 2017 that, as part of its efforts to renegotiate new licensing deals with music labels, Spotify and major record labels had agreed that Spotify would restrict some newly released albums to its Premium tier, with Spotify receiving a reduction in royalty fees to do so. In countries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Spotify registered a fall in users in late February, but it has seen a recovery. On 19 June 2018, XXXTentacion’s hit single «Sad!» broke Swift’s single-day streaming record, amassing 10.4 million streams the day after he was fatally shot in Florida.
In September 2020, Google announced it had retroactively offset all of its carbon emissions since the company’s foundation in 1998. In December 2016, Google announced that—starting in 2017—it would purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy usage of its data centers and offices. The corporation exercised this authorization in September 2013 when it announced it would purchase all the electricity produced by the not-yet-built 240-megawatt Happy Hereford wind farm.
Some of the premium options users may choose from include individual, duo, family, and student. There was no provision regarding worker ownership of content created, one of the initial demands. In February 2020, Spotify announced it was acquiring The Ringer, and inheriting the previously established union.