Spotify distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights-holders, who will then pay artists based on their individual agreements. The primary point of criticism centers around what artists, music creators, and the media have described as “unsustainable” compensation. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it temporarily closed its office in Russia and indefinitely suspended all of its services in the country.
Research and technology
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. 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. 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.”
The post stated that all free members would be limited to ten hours of music streaming per month, and in addition, individual tracks were limited to five plays. 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. Spotify has experimented with different limitations to users’ listening on the Free service tier. Instead, a 30% commission is applied to recording royalties generated from all streams of selected songs in Discovery Mode contexts—Spotify Radio and Autoplay.
Google around the globe
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.
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.
Advertising
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.
In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. On October 9, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, On July 20, 2007, Google bids $4.6 billion for the wireless-spectrum auction by the FCC.
Consumer services
The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. In August 2023, Google became the first major tech company to join the felice bet OpenWallet Foundation, launched earlier in the year, whose goal was creating open-source software for interoperable digital wallets.
- 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.”
- On September 14, 2022, Google lost the appeal of a €4.125 billion (£3.5 billion) fine, which was ruled to be paid after it was proved by the European Commission that Google forced Android phone-makers to carry Google’s search and web browser apps.
- As of 18 November 2021,update “Behind the Lyrics” has been replaced with auto-generated real-time lyrics due to consumer demand.
- It has been referred to as “the most powerful company in the world” by BBC, and is one of the world’s most valuable brands.
- 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).
Financial services
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. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for “promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results”.
- 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.
- In January 2015, Sony announced PlayStation Music, a new music service with Spotify as its exclusive partner.
Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed. In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium. In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called “Project Bernanke” that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services. The company subsequently announced that “48 employees have been fired over the last two years” for sexual misconduct. While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites.
The “deeper” loss came as a result of the company’s tax debt to over one-third of its employees in Sweden. That September, Spotify announced that it had paid a total of over $5 billion to the music industry. In May 2016, Spotify announced “Sponsored Playlists”, a monetisation opportunity in which brands can specify the audiences they have in mind, with Spotify matching the marketer with suitable music in a playlist. This eligibility rule only applies to royalties for sound recordings, not musical compositions. In November 2023, Spotify announced a new royalty model taking effect in 2024, aiming to reduce the amount of “fraudulent” royalties collected from “functional” non-music tracks with short lengths (such as environmental sounds and white noise). In December 2013, the company launched a new website, “Spotify for Artists”, explaining its business model and revenue data.
Social Media
Later that same year, in March, Spotify removed all limits on the free service tier indefinitely, including mobile devices. Using PC streaming, a similar structure to the one used today allowed the listener to play songs freely, but with ads every 4–7 songs depending on listening duration. In January 2012, the free trial periods began to expire, limiting users to ten hours of streaming each month and five plays per song. 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.
In March 2021, Spotify acquired app developer Betty Labs and their live social audio app, Locker Room, On 12 May 2021. On 12 September 2019, Spotify acquired SoundBetter, a music production marketplace for people in the music industry to collaborate on projects, and distribute music tracks for licensing. 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. 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.
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.