History
Spotify was developed in 2006 by a team at Spotify AB, which is located in Stockholm, Sweden. The company was founded by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll, and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler. Spotify Ltd. now operates as the parent company in London. Research and development is still carried out by Spotify AB in Stockholm.
The Spotify application was launched for public access on 7 October 2008. While free accounts remained available by invitation only in order to manage the growth rate of the service, the launch opened paid subscriptions to everyone. At the same time, Spotify AB also announced licensing deals with many major music labels. The company reported a $4.4 million loss for the year of 2008.
The first steps towards offering free accounts to the public without invitations were taken on 10 February 2009, when Spotify opened free registration in the UK. Due to a surge in registrations following the release of the Spotify mobile service, Spotify closed its open registrations in the UK for part of 2009, and went back to an invitation-only policy.
On 4 March 2009, Spotify announced a previous security flaw in the Spotify service, by which private account information (including email addresses and hashed salted passwords) of members registered prior to 19 December 2008 were potentially exposed.
On 28 January 2010, Symantec's antivirus software marked Spotify as a Trojan horse, disabling the software across millions of computers.
In February 2010, Spotify received a small investment from Founders Fund, where board member Sean Parker was recruited to assist Spotify in "winning the labels over in the world's largest music market".
On 18 May 2010, Spotify announced that two more types of accounts were available: Spotify Unlimited, an equivalent to Spotify Premium without mobile and other features, and Spotify Open, a reduced-feature version of Spotify Free, which allows users to listen to up to 20 hours of music per month. Spotify Free remains an invite-only service.
On 1 September 2010, the World Economic Forum announced the company as a Technology Pioneer for 2011.
Roberta Maley also known as "Roberta from Spotify" was the Premium Services Director of Spotify. She is known for her appearance in some Spotify advertisements.
On 25 March 2011, Spotify temporarily removed display advertising from external sources on its open and free accounts, due to an attack which used an exploit in Java to place malicious code on victims' computers.
On 15 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. The post stated that all Spotify Open and Spotify Free members would be transferred to a new product which limited audio streaming to ten hours per month. In addition, a user could only listen to a single track a maximum of five times. Spotify Unlimited and Spotify Premium members were not affected by this change. New users were exempt from these changes for six months.
On 17 June 2011, it was reported that Spotify had secured another $100 million of funding and planned to use this to support its US launch. The new round of funding saw the company valued at US$1 billion.
On 14 July 2011, Spotify launched its US service, a major milestone after delays and years of negotiation with the four major record companies.
On 30 November 2011, Spotify launched Spotify Apps and App Finder to "bring new and exciting music experiences built around your music tastes." App launch partners included Rolling Stone, We Are Hunted, Top10, Songkick, The Guardian, Soundrop and Last.FM.
On 29 March 2012, Spotify removed the restriction that limited non-US free users to five plays per song, yet the restriction remained in effect in the UK and France. The ten hours per month limit remained in place for all free accounts older than six months; however, they also announced "continued unlimited free listening" for users in the US.
In August 2012, Spotify moved its 350 employees in Stockholm into the new headquarters office at Birger Jarlsgatan 61. The new facilities provide space for nearly 450 employees.
A further round of funding was closed after eight months in November 2012, with about $100 million raised at a $3 billion valuation from a group of investors led by Goldman Sachs.
On 19 March 2013, Spotify removed the restriction that limited UK free users to five plays per song.
On 16 April 2013, Spotify was launched and became available in Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Windows Store in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia., Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico and Iceland.
On its release in April 2013, long-awaited Daft Punk comeback single Get Lucky racked up the highest number of plays of any song in a single day.
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