In April 2015, Google announced Project Fi, a mobile virtual network operator, that combines Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different telecommunication providers in an effort to enable seamless connectivity and fast Internet signal. Following Google’s corporate restructure to make Alphabet Inc. its parent company, Google Fiber was moved to Alphabet’s Access division. In February 2010, Google announced the Google Fiber project, with experimental plans to build an ultra-high-speed broadband network for 50,000 to 500,000 customers in one or more American cities. Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal wrote that the suite competes with existing marketing cloud offerings by companies including Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM. In October 2016, Google announced Daydream View, a lightweight VR viewer which lets the user place their smartphone in the front hinge to view VR media.
Some of the premium options users may choose from include individual, duo, family, and student. There was no provision regarding worker ownership of content created, one of the initial demands. In February 2020, Spotify announced it was acquiring The Ringer, and inheriting the previously established union.
Google Labs
Later that month, Spotify also acquired MightyTV, an app connected to television streaming services, including Netflix and HBO Go, that recommends content to users. In December 2013, CEO Daniel Ek announced that Android and iOS smartphone users with the free service tier could listen to music in Shuffle mode, a feature in which users can stream music by specific artists and playlists without being able to pick which songs to hear. Today, royalties on all streaming services, including Spotify are paid on a per user basis not per stream as this allows the artists who users listen to the most to receive the largest percentage of the payouts. In May 2017, Google enabled a new “Personal” tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts’ various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos. In October 2017, Microsoft announced that it would be ending its Groove Music streaming service by December, with all music from users transferring to Spotify as part of a new partnership. In March 2021, David Dayen argued in The American Prospect that musicians were in peril due to monopolies in streaming services like Spotify.
Spotify
- Some of the premium options users may choose from include individual, duo, family, and student.
- Spotify operates under a freemium business model (basic services are free, while additional features are offered via paid subscriptions).
- In July 2025, several artists joined a boycott of Spotify because Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek raised another $600 million in support of German defense company Helsing through his investment fund.
- Spotify also announced that the third season of WNYC Studios’ 2 Dope Queens podcast would premiere with a two-week exclusivity period on the service on 21 March 2017.
- The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes.
In April 2012, Spotify introduced a “Spotify Play Button”, an embeddable music player that can be added to blogs, websites, or social media profiles, that lets visitors listen to a specific song, playlist, or album without leaving the page. In June 2012, Soundrop became the first Spotify app to attract major funding, receiving $3 million (equivalent to $4,039,000 in 2024) from Spotify investor Northzone. If a song is “loved”, a custom radio channel will be created based on it, and when there are at least 15 of these songs, a “My Favourites” channel is unlocked. In October 2017, Spotify launched “Rise”, a program aimed at promoting emerging artists. The feature was rolled out to a small number of US-based artists by invitation only.
According to some computer science and music experts, various music communities are often ignored or overlooked by music streaming services such as Spotify. In 2016, Spotify was criticized for allegedly making certain artists’ music harder to find than others, as these artists would release their music to the rival streaming service Apple Music before releasing it to Spotify. While the streaming music industry in general faces the same critique about inadequate payments, Spotify, being the leading service, faces particular scrutiny due to its free service tier, allowing users to listen to music for free, though with advertisements between tracks. Spotify has been criticised by artists and producers including Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke, who have argued that Spotify does not fairly compensate musicians, and both withdrew their music from the service.
Enterprise services
The aim was to help users to listen to the music they want without information overload or spending time building their own playlists. Spotify gets its content from major record labels as well as independent artists and pays copyright holders royalties for streaming music. On October 6, 2025, Spotify announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring music and podcast recommendations inside ChatGPT, allowing Spotify users to discover and queue new music through conversations, rather than search.
- The said data hub will add to the already operational center near Columbus, bringing Google’s total investment in Ohio to over $2 billion.
- In addition to its 100,000+ full-time employees, Google used about 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, as of March 2019.update
- For example, Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road and Doja Cat’s Say So started their popularity through Tik Tok but through Spotify playlists had their popularity accelerated.
- Google has been criticized for continuing to collect location data from users who had turned off location-sharing settings.
- Despite the extensive global coverage, the service remains unavailable in several countries and territories, including Afghanistan, British Indian Ocean Territory, Central African Republic, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Yemen.
Features
After the success of its original service, Google Search (often known simply as “Google”), the company has rapidly grown to offer a multitude of products and services. Spotify does not sell user data but did begin selling broader trend data, often coined “streaming intelligence” to marketing firms in 2016, allowing for the data to be available directly to clients. Pelly advocated for a move away from the current royalty model that says the artists who people listen to the most should make felice bet the most money toward a more generalized approach where the decision for who gets paid rests with industry or government bodies, not audiences. In July 2025, several artists joined a boycott of Spotify because Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek raised another $600 million in support of German defense company Helsing through his investment fund.
In July 2021, Spotify launched the “What’s New” feed, a section that collects all new releases and episodes from artists and podcasts that the user follows. In June 2019, Spotify launched a custom playlist titled “Your Daily Drive” that closely replicates the drive time format of many traditional radio stations. Rap Caviar had 10.9 million followers by 2019, becoming one of Spotify’s Top 5 playlists.
Upon discovering Ding had been in contact with Chinese state-owned companies, Google notified the FBI, who carried on the investigation of the data breach. Ding had allegedly stolen over 500 files from the company over the course of 5 years, having been hired in 2019. In March 2024, a former Google software engineer and Chinese national named Linwei Ding was accused of stealing confidential artificial intelligence information from the company and handing it to Chinese corporations. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google had violated EU antitrust rules by “imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites” that required them to exclude search results from Google’s rivals.
Google’s Global Offices sum a total of 86 locations worldwide, with 32 offices in North America, three of them in Canada and 29 in the United States, California being the state with the most Google’s offices with 9 in total including the Googleplex. In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions at the time of the deal’s announcement in January, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017. It also has product research and development operations in cities around the world, namely Sydney (birthplace location of Google Maps) and London (part of Android development). In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping-related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City.
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. Terry Semel, Yahoo’s then-CEO, offered $3 billion to purchase the company, but Page and Brin reportedly held firm on a $5 billion valuation. Both firms were initially hesitant about investing jointly in Google, as each wanted to retain a larger percentage of control over the company to themselves. Page and Brin had first approached Shriram, who was a venture capitalist, for funding and counsel, and Shriram invested $250,000 in Google in February 1998. This initial investment served as a motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds.
Stay connected, across the internet
On October 8, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to “non-public” Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for “promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results”. On May 1, 2023, Google placed an ad against the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630, an anti-disinformation law that was about to be approved, on its search homepage in Brazil, calling on its users to ask congressional representatives to oppose the legislation. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels on its Mountain View campus to provide up to 1.6 Megawatt of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus’ energy needs. There is no official data on the number of servers in Google data centers; however, research and advisory firm Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers. Google’s services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef’s “Bork bork bork”, Pig Latin, “Hacker” or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine.
Google launched its Google News service in 2002, an automated service which summarizes news articles from various websites. According to comScore market research from November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.
On January 21, 2019, French data regulator CNIL imposed a record €50 million fine on Google for breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The project was canceled in December following the backlash it garnered both externally and internally within the company. In June 2022, Google agreed to pay a $118 million settlement to 15,550 female employees working in California since 2013. Google called these proposals excessive and harmful to consumers, pledging to appeal.