Spotify Wikipedia

Other Palestinian employees have described an “institutionalised bias” within the company. Google has had criticism over issues such as aggressive tax avoidance, search neutrality, copyright, censorship of search results and content, and privacy. In 2008, Google announced its “project 10100”, which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites.

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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.

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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. In September 2018, Spotify announced “Upload Beta”, allowing artists to upload directly to the platform instead of going through a distributor or record label. The ability to purchase and download music tracks via the app was removed on 4 January 2013. In order to balance the expense of licensing audiobooks and music together, the company started a new “bundle” royalty rate to songwriters.

• Spotifya is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded in April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon.
• The DoJ also sought a ban on Google re-entering the browser market for five years and restrictions on its investments in rival search or AI technologies.
• In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based, MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up company Raxium.
• The company also introduced “Spotify Running”, a feature aimed at improving music while running with music matched to running tempo, and announced that podcasts and videos (“entertainment, news and clips”) would be coming to Spotify, along with “Spotify Originals” content.
• There was no provision regarding worker ownership of content created, one of the initial demands.
• The formation of the union is in response to persistent allegations of mistreatment of Google employees and a toxic workplace culture.
• In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon.

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.”

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When you sign in to your Google Account, all the Google services you use work together to help you get more done. No matter which device or Google service you’re using, your account gives you a consistent experience you can customize and manage at any time. Sign in to your Google Account, and get the most out of all the Google services you use. In April 2018, thousands of Google employees, including senior engineers, signed a letter urging Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end this controversial contract with the Pentagon. Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings. The lawsuit claims Google collected data from users who had specifically opted out of tracking.

• In November 2022, Henry Catalini Smith, a Spotify engineer in Malmö, set up the channel #kollektivavtal in the internal company Slack, which means “collective agreement” in Swedish.
• 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.
• Spotify’s terms and conditions do not permit users to reverse-engineer the application.
• 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.
• Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed.
• This approach is not intended to raise fresh capital, but to let investors get their returns.
• 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”.

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This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets. On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment complaints. On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London.
Other artists and podcasters, such as Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Brené Brown, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash, also announced a boycott of Spotify. 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”. 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.

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The testing was very limited in nature and was only available on Spotify’s Android app in the US. Some artists included in this initial test phase were Steve Aoki and the Wombats. In May 2022, Spotify began testing a feature that would allow select artists to promote their NFTs via their profiles. In September 2020, Spotify, Epic, and other companies founded The Coalition for App Fairness, which aims for better conditions for the inclusion of apps in app stores. In 2019, under iOS 13, it became possible to play Spotify music using Siri commands.
In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists. Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace”, and he was fired on the same day.
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”. 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. 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.
Spotify generates revenue by selling premium streaming subscriptions to users and advertising placements to third parties. Spotify operates under a freemium business model (basic services are free, while additional features are offered via paid subscriptions). In December 2025, over 300 terabytes of files were scraped from Spotify’s servers and uploaded to Anna’s Archive, totalling 86 million songs uploaded from 2007 to July 2025 that account for 37% of all songs and 99.6% of all listens, as well as 256 million rows of song metadata. 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 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.
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.
Users can create, edit and share playlists, share tracks on social media, and make playlists with other users. Unlike the apps, the web player does not have the ability to download music for offline listening. The standalone app was made available to all iOS and Android users in the United States since 4 June 2019. On 31 January 2018, Spotify started testing a new Pandora-styled standalone app called Stations by Spotify for Australian Android users. The company also announced an expansion of its book catalogue to 250,000 books.
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.
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.

Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s internet properties and interests. 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.
In March 2013, the five-play individual track limit was removed for users in the United Kingdom, and media reports stated that users in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand never had the limit in the first place. In April 2025, Spotify expanded its AI Playlist beta feature to Premium listeners in over 40 new English-speaking markets, including countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. All other streams of selected songs outside of Spotify Radio and Autoplay remain commission-free. In November 2021, Spotify launched the City and Local Pulse charts, aimed at representing the songs listened to in major cities around the world. The feature is represented by a bell icon on the app’s main page and is available on iOS felice bet and Android.