Spotify News.

Juan Manuel Serruya left Spotify to found Tonada, a Stockholm startup that creates original AI-generated music for businesses, bypassing licensing fees. The company raised $3M in pre-seed funding from Antler and Vercel's founder. Matched music boosted sales 9.1% in a study of 1.8 million transactions.

Spotify stops username-based logins on September 1, 2026. Users must sign in with email and password instead. Google and Apple account logins remain unaffected. Users should verify and update their linked email before the deadline.

Spotify's non-English content consumption now exceeds half of all streams, with songs in 16 languages reaching the global top 50. The platform has 761 million users across 184 markets, and most artists earn over half their royalties from outside their home country. India is now one of Spotify's largest markets by monthly active users.

Adyen handles payments for Uber, Spotify, eBay, and Microsoft from an Amsterdam canal house. The engineering team eats lunch at a single long table. At its 2018 IPO worth €7 billion, Adyen had roughly 1,000 employees worldwide, fewer staff than a midsize hotel.

Qobuz, a 19-year-old French lossless music streamer, grew to around 500,000 subscribers before 2025 became a banner year. A book criticizing Spotify's business practices boosted Qobuz's US trial numbers. The service offers a 100 million-plus catalog of CD-quality and 24-bit music.

Spotify demonstrated an AI feature at its May 21, 2026 Investor Day that lets Premium mobile users in the US, Sweden, or Ireland ask questions about a playing podcast episode and get answers from its transcript. Users can request explanations of topics or skip to specific moments without leaving the app.

Spotify added short editor-led videos inside the New Music Friday playlist for US listeners. The videos show editors discussing standout releases and rising artists. The feature, available to Free and Premium users, generated more than double the engagement in saves and likes compared to the standard playlist experience.

Spotify removed 57,000 fake podcast episodes and banned 3,500 accounts tied to illegal drug sales after a US Senate investigation led by Senator Maggie Hassan. The episodes used AI-generated audio to direct listeners to websites selling opioids and modafinil. In all of 2024, Spotify actioned only 87 accounts for similar violations.