Spotify

Spotify is the world's largest music streaming service, with more than 770 million monthly active users, accounting for around 30% of the global music streaming market. The platform's emergence accelerated the shift away from music ownership (via CDs and downloads) and toward streaming, reshaping the music industry's economics at large. Spotify is a publicly traded company with a market cap of about $114B as of Sept. 2026.

Founded in 2006 by Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm and officially launched in 2008, Spotify was created as a solution to the era's rampant music piracy problem. Specifically, the founders' idea was for a user-friendly platform that would connect users to a vast library of music and bring a legal solution to the illegal downloads issue.

Spotify's business model is built around licensing, rather than owning, the audio its users stream. This requires the company to continually negotiate deals with rights holders. To offset that dependency, Spotify has expanded into other forms of audio, acquiring podcast companies like Anchor and Gimlet Media, as well as investing in audiobooks. Critics have argued that Spotify makes it difficult for independent musicians to generate fair income from the platform, and that Spotify's algorithm unfairly favors mainstream hits and high-volume streaming.