Over the last decade, we have seen music streaming services grow tremendously in the industry. The idea of music streaming services is to bring you millions of songs, from all genres, for whatever situation you find yourself in. Streaming services have forced big players like iTunes to go their way or, sadly, get left behind. Streaming websites argue that 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 are ups and downs, unfortunately, there must be ups and downs and for streaming websites this has certainly been the case, especially over the last couple of years.
Music streaming sites in general work in a similar way. Most allow consumers to use their service for free, with the drawback of having to listen to commercials between songs, but they also have a paid version of the service, where you pay a fixed price per month or year, and take advantage of little for without interruption. Streaming services, in short, have music banks of a wide range of artists and genres where customers can usually customize their own profiles with whatever music they choose, create their own playlists, and use the services’ radio settings. where they select songs for you. Before music streaming services began to grow, paying a flat price for a single song on iTunes and loading it onto your device seemed like the road of travel. In today’s era, it’s clear that streaming services are taking over, from movies to music, streaming seems like the most efficient way to operate. There are many streaming services to choose from these days, such as Pandora, Google Music, Amazon Prime Music, Apple Music, etc. But I want to focus on the player that has had the most impact on the industry, or so it seems, Spotify.
Spotify, founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, was launched in 2008 hoping to forever change the way we listen to music. Along with most streaming services, Spotify lets you search for 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 with Facebook, where users with Spotify accounts could choose an option where recent songs they listened to would appear on their Facebook profile. In my opinion, this was Spotify’s best decision in terms of growing their service. Today, Spotify has 1,500 employees, more than 75 million users, music available in more than 50 languages, and is available on demand on almost every platform.