Rise of Music Streaming Service – Spotify

Rise of Music Streaming Service – Spotify

Over the past decade we have seen music streaming services in the industry rise tremendously. The idea of music streaming services is to bring you millions of songs, of all genres, for whatever situation you land yourself in. Streaming services have forced big players like iTunes to follow in their path or unfortunately get left behind. Streaming websites argue they are contributing positively to the industry with the underlying fact that music seems to be growing again. But like anything else in this world where there is ups, unfortunately, there must be downs and for streaming websites this has certainly been the case, especially over the last couple of year.

Music streaming sites in general all operate in similar ways. The majority allows consumers to use their service for free, with the downside of having to listen to advertising in between songs, but also have a paid version of the service, where you pay a set price per month or year, and draw in little to no interruption. Streaming services, in short, have banks of music from a wide range of artists and genres where customers are usually allowed to customize their own profiles with any music they choose, create playlists of their own and use the services radio setting where they curate songs for you. Before music streaming services started booming, paying a set price for a single song on iTunes and uploading it on your device seemed to be the most traveled path. In today’s age it is clear that streaming services are taking over, from movies to music, streaming seems to be the most efficient way of operating. There are many streaming services to choose from in our day and age, such as, Pandora, Google Music, Amazon Prime Music, Apple Music, etc. But I want to focus on the player that has impacted the industry the most, or so it seems, Spotify.

Spotify, founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, launched in 2008 in hopes of changing the way we listen to music forever. Along with most streaming services, Spotify allows you to search any artist, track, album, genre or playlist to find exactly what you’re looking for. Spotify also allows you to “follow” your friends and artists in the industry to see what they’re listening to. Spotify partnered up with Facebook where users with Spotify accounts could choose an option where the recent songs they listened to would pop up on their Facebook profile. In my opinion this was Spotify’s best decision as far as growing their service. Today, Spotify has 1,500 employees, 75+ millions users, music available in 50+ languages and is available in an application form on almost every platform.