Spotify

Want to listen to Taylor Swift? Sure! Want to hear something from Post Malone? Absolutely! Dua Lipa? Halsey? They’re all there at your fingertips. You don’t have to pay a dime to hear any of them, either—unless you want to listen to your songs without ads in between. But not to worry. It’s all perfectly legal. This free, instant musical gratification is brought to you by Spotify, a Swedish technology company that has been streaming music since 2008. It started as an idea to combine music and technology. It has become one of the most popular ways for the world to listen not only to music but also to podcasts, news shows, and more. I Said What? When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were trying to come up with a name for their company, they sat in Ek’s apartment and shouted ideas at each other. One of the words Lorentzon thought he heard Ek suggest was “Spotify.” He liked the sound of it, so he typed “spotify.com” into his Internet browser to see if that name was claimed. When nothing came up, he decided to purchase the “spotify.com” domain name all around the world and declared Spotify as the company name. Ek claims that Lorentzon must have misheard him and that he never suggested Spotify—but he embraced the name, nonetheless. Music for the Masses By 2015, more than 75 million people around the world were listening to music on Spotify. That included more than 15 million listeners who had paid subscriptions to the streaming service. Taylor Swift’s public “break-up” with Spotify had caused only minimal impact on the company—just a few hundred paid subscribers left the service after Swift withdrew her music.