How Spotify stayed No. 1 in streaming music vs. Apple, YouTube, Amazon – CNBC

Onur Dogman | LightRocket | Getty ImagesIn this weekly series, CNBC takes a look at companies that made the inaugural Disruptor 50 list, 10 years later.Spotify, once a Swedish startup tasked with tackling music piracy issues, is now the most popular audio streaming subscription service in the world.First launched in 2008, the platform began as a way to allow listeners to stream their favorite songs while still compensating artists for their work – a major issue caused by file-sharing services at the time, like Napster and LimeWire, which severely affected music sales as the services had no legal rights to the music.Today, Spotify has more than 80 million tracks available to users to stream. In its most recent earnings report, the company touted its 456 million active users with 195 million paid subscribers across 183 markets. The platform disrupted the audio streaming field – being named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2013, also making appearances on the list in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 – and set the blueprint for audio streaming services to come.Spotify’s success quickly caught the eye of major technology competitors, who have since released their own streaming music platforms such as Apple Music, YouTube
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