Spotify is expanding into over 80 new markets in more than 36 new languages – including key territories across Africa such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, Spotify reports. Together, these 80 markets house more than a billion people with nearly half of them already using the internet. The vast expansion over the coming days means that Spotify will be active in more than 173 markets.

Just a very funny article in Vice about how to become a millionaire on Spotify by playing your music on your own computer, or rather on a lot of computers. You need 30-second songs - once a track is 30 seconds in, it counts as a stream. Continuously streaming 30-second songs for 24-hours on one computer nets you £7.89 per day. You need those songs to be played all day, every day, for a year, on 360 computers, and at the end of that year – you’ll have earned over £1,000,000 in streams! Genius; well, at least in theory.

Spotify’s pre-tax loss in 2020 weighed in at €709m, five times the equivalent loss seen at the company in the prior year, Music Business Worldwide reports on the financial year of the biggest music streaming service. Other infos are much better - share price surged from $152.50 on January 3 to $341.66 on December 31, up 106%. Spotify's revenues grew 93% from 2017 (€4.09bn) to 2020 (€7.88bn). Spotify’s Sales & Marketing expenditure bounded up in 2020 - it jumped a full 25% to surpass a billion euros (€1.03bn) for the first time ever, doubling in the three years from 2017 to 2020.

Starting Tuesday, Spotify users in South Korea will have access to more than 60 million tracks and over 4 billion playlists from around the world, ZDnet reports. Upon launch, Spotify will exert most of its domestic efforts on the global phenomenon of K-pop. In the last six years, Spotify listeners have streamed more than 180 billion minutes of K-pop with the share of K-pop listening increasing by more than 2,000% in the same period. Spotify’s customer base now stands at 320 million monthly active users and 144 million subscribers worldwide.

Australian drivers in Queensland who use Spotify in the car will be part of the government's trial safety program, which plays motorists messages urging them to slow down when nearing the state’s school zones, Brisbane Times reports. The feature uses Spotify’s geo-targeting ability to track when drivers come within five kilometres of a school zone and plays them one of 10 specially adapted songs that contain a “slow down” message.

Spotify has patented technology that will allow it to analyse user's voice and suggest songs based on "emotional state, gender, age, or accent" of the listener, Music Business Worldwide reports. The patent suggests that speech recognition could be used to gather information about age and gender, while contextual cues such as "intonation, stress, rhythm" would provide clues as to whether a user was "happy, angry, sad or neutral". In September, Spotify patented a karaoke-like feature that allows people to "overlay a music track with their own vocals". Earlier this week, Spotify also gained permission for a "cadence-based media content selection engine" - which matches the tempo of the music to the listener's running speed.

The Toronto singer/rapper has become the first artist ever to surpass 50 billion combined streams on Spotify, with his 2018 song ‘God’s Plan’ racking up 1.67 billion streams alone, NME reports. Drake has clocked up 35.72 billion streams of his own songs and 14.30 billion streams of “featured streams” (such as tracks he has guested on).

Spotify, Pandora and Deezer are all using personalised systems to suggest playlists or tracks tailored to the user, so people using these service end up listening to - more of the same. Wired suggests how to break out of that loop. The simplest way is to actively seek out something new - a new genre, or something completely different, just to shake up the algorithm. Listening to playlists curated by individuals also helps, as well as content-based recommendations which are based on sound rather than other people’s listening habits.

On January 1, 2021, Spotify enacted a massive, global takedown of music from thousands of independent artists. Some 750,000 songs were removed, the vast majority of which appear to have used Distrokid for distribution - Music Think Tank reports. Spotify is alleging artificial or “fraudulent streams”, and it appears Spotify's moves are targeted at any independent artist who used a third party playlist or independent marketing service to promote their music.

Spotify has donated $500,000 to the National Independent Venue Association in a show of solidarity with music venues in the U.S. that aren't part of a conglomerated promotion apparatus such as Live Nation or AEG. The donation comes at a critical time for indie venues across the U.S. as they face a long winter without live shows, possibly even well into the next year as well. Spotify's half-million-dollar donation is the second-largest that NIVA has received since its inception - only Anheuser-Busch has given more, $1 million.That plant needs watering