Spotify

Spotify is a streaming service for music, podcasts and audiobooks that runs on phones, tablets, computers and connected speakers. Nothing is bought track by track: audio is played on demand from the company's catalogue, and the service adds its own recommendations, curated playlists, radio-style stations and user playlists that can be shared with others. Listening comes in two shapes — a free, ad-supported service and paid Premium plans that remove the ads, add offline downloads and allow tracks to be played in any order.

The catalogue is large by the company's own published figures: over 100 million tracks, 7 million podcast titles and 700,000 audiobooks, offered in 184 markets to 777 million users, of whom around 300 million pay for a subscription. Premium is sold as several plans — individual, student, Duo for two people at one address, Family for up to six accounts, and an audiobooks-only access plan — and several of them include 15 hours a month of audiobook listening. A separate developer platform exposes Web APIs and SDKs for building playback and catalogue experiences.

Spotify launched in 2008, moved into podcasting afterwards and entered the audiobook market in 2022. The operating company, Spotify AB, is registered in Stockholm, Sweden, at Regeringsgatan 19; Spotify Technology S.A. sits in Luxembourg, and the company keeps offices in cities including London, New York, Toronto, Madrid, Paris, Milan, Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Brussels, Mexico City and Mumbai. The service is proprietary and vendor-hosted, with no open-source edition and no self-hosted deployment.