Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 615 million monthly active users, including 239 million paying subscribers, as of March 2024. Spotify is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts.

Streaming media refers to multimedia for playback using an offline or online media player that is delivered through a network. Media is transferred in a "stream" of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains an entire media file before consuming the content. Streaming is presently most prevalent in video-on-demand, streaming television, and music streaming services over the Internet.