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).
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. 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 features were announced by CEO Daniel Ek at a press conference, with Ek saying that a common user complaint about the service was that “Spotify is great when you know what music you want to listen to, but not when you don’t”. “Follow” lets users follow artists and friends to see what they are listening to, while “Discover” directs users to new releases as well as music, review, and concert recommendations based on listening history. Users can create, edit and share playlists, share tracks on social media, and make playlists with other users.

• 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 February 2021, Spotify announced their plans to introduce a HiFi subscription, to offer listening in high fidelity, lossless sound quality.
• In February 2018, Spotify integrated with the gaming-oriented voice chat service Discord on desktop clients, allowing users to display their currently playing song as a rich presence on their profile, and invite other users with Spotify Premium to group “listening parties”.
• In November 2021, Spotify launched the City and Local Pulse charts, aimed at representing the songs listened to in major cities around the world.
• Users can add tracks to a “Collection” section of the app, rather than adding them to a specific playlist.
• In Spotify’s apps, music can be browsed or searched for via various parameters, such as artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label.
• Spotify first announced a voice-activated music-streaming gadget for cars in May 2019.

Data Linked to You

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 26 January, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify after they refused to remove the podcast. This policy was revoked in June because the company deemed the original wording to be too “vague”; they stated that “Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists. Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct”.

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• In response to the allegations about unfair compensation, Spotify claims that it is benefitting the industry by migrating users away from unauthorized copying and less monetized platforms to its free service tier, and then downgrades that service until they upgrade to paid accounts.
• On September 10, 2025, it was announced that Lossless would be rolling out to Premium listeners gradually to more than 50 markets through October.
• Offline Music listening is possible on watchOS and more recently added to Google’s WearOS for those with premium subscriptions.
• On 19 November 2019, Spotify announced the acquisition of the exclusive rights to The Last Podcast on the Left.
• Spotify generates revenue by selling premium streaming subscriptions to users and advertising placements to third parties.
• Instead, a 30% commission is applied to recording royalties generated from all streams of selected songs in Discovery Mode contexts—Spotify Radio and Autoplay.

Spotify gets its content from major record labels as well as independent artists and pays copyright holders royalties for streaming music. In May 2023, Spotify removed tens of thousands of songs, roughly 7% of the tracks uploaded by the Boomy, due to suspected “artificial streaming”, the practice of using online bots to inflate the listening statistics. 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. 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. In December 2021, Spotify acquired Whooshkaa, a podcast tech company that develops specialized technology that allows radio broadcasters to easily turn their existing audio content into on-demand podcast programming.

Stations by Spotify

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.

Dispute with Apple

The Waze partnership allows Waze app users to view directions to destinations within the Spotify app and access their Spotify playlists through the Waze app. 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 integration also enabled Spotify within the SXSW GO app to help users discover and explore artists performing at the conference. In January 2015, Sony announced PlayStation Music, a new music service with Spotify as its exclusive partner. In November 2021, Spotify acquired audiobook company Findaway, including its publishing imprint OrangeSky Audio.

In July 2025, a leak containing the listening data of several politicians, journalists, and businesspeople, titled the Panama Playlists, was released online. 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.” 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. Helsing is an AI defense software company that also engages in military strike drone manufacturing. Spotify promised to frostybet casino add content advisories for anything containing discussions related to COVID-19 and posted additional rules.
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 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.
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.
The subscription costs $0.99 and is supposed to be a combination of the free and premium tiers. On September 10, 2025, it was announced that Lossless would be rolling out to Premium listeners gradually to more than 50 markets through October. Spotify introduced a Family subscription in October 2014, which allows up to 5 family members to have a premium subscription.

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). Spotify generates revenue by selling premium streaming subscriptions to users and advertising placements to third parties. In February 2018, Spotify integrated with the gaming-oriented voice chat service Discord on desktop clients, allowing users to display their currently playing song as a rich presence on their profile, and invite other users with Spotify Premium to group “listening parties”.
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. On 26 March 2019, Spotify announced they would acquire another podcast network, Parcast. On 6 February 2019, Spotify acquired the podcast networks Gimlet Media and Anchor FM Inc., with the goal of establishing themselves as a leading figure in podcasting. This was followed in May 2017 with the acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Niland, which uses technology to improve personalisation and recommendation features for users.