Spotify Trivia
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100 free Spotify trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free Spotify trivia questions with answers. Spotify is the app most of us open every day without thinking about it, and this quiz digs into the company behind it. You will cover the founding story in Stockholm, the freemium model and how royalties actually flow, the streaming records set by Drake, Ed Sheeran and Bad Bunny, the rise of Wrapped and Discover Weekly, and the big bets and blunders: podcasts, Joe Rogan, Car Thing, HiFi and the ghost-artist controversy. It is written for music fans, marketing and tech people who follow the streaming wars, and pub-quiz hosts who want a round that everyone under 40 will have opinions about. Difficulty runs from easy to hard, so casual listeners and industry nerds can play together. Every answer is checked against a reference page and each question carries its source, so if a fact surprises you, you can go and read where it came from.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which country was Spotify founded in April 2006?
Sweden
Spotify was founded in Stockholm, Sweden, in April 2006; a decade later its founders published an open letter threatening to move jobs abroad unless Sweden fixed its housing and stock-option rules.
Q 02Who co-founded Spotify with Martin Lorentzon?
Daniel Ek
Daniel Ek co-founded Spotify with Lorentzon in 2006 and was its chief executive from the start, having earlier been chief technology officer of the Swedish browser game Stardoll.
Q 03According to co-founder Ek, the name 'Spotify' came about how?
Lorentzon shouted something and Ek misheard it
Lorentzon shouted something and Ek misheard it, as Ek tells it: a name called across the room came out as 'Spotify', and only afterwards did the pair rationalise it as a blend of 'spot' and 'identify'.
Q 04Which shut-down file-sharing service gave Ek the idea for Spotify around 2002?
Napster
Napster, shut down in 2001, convinced Ek that piracy could never be legislated away; the only fix, he said, was a legal service better than piracy that also paid the industry.
Q 05Before Spotify, Ek briefly served as CEO of which BitTorrent client?
μTorrent
Ek was briefly chief executive of μTorrent in 2006, working with its creator Ludvig Strigeus until the client was sold to BitTorrent Inc. that December; Strigeus then became a key Spotify engineer.
Q 06Which country was not among Spotify's public launch markets of October 2008?
Germany
Germany was not among them: the October 2008 launch covered the UK, France, Spain, Finland, Norway and Spotify's home market, and Germany only followed in March 2012.
Q 07In which year did Spotify launch in the United States?
2011
Spotify launched in the United States on 14 July 2011, giving new users an unlimited free trial before a ten-hour monthly cap that was scrapped in March 2012.
Q 08Spotify's business model, with a free ad-supported tier and paid upgrades, is described by what term?
Freemium
Freemium pairs a free ad-supported tier with paid Premium upgrades; Spotify has run on it since its 2008 launch, with advertising funding the free listeners.
Q 09Roughly what share of its total revenue does Spotify pay out to rights holders such as record labels?
70%
Spotify has said about 70% of its revenue goes to rights holders, who then pay artists under their own contracts; payouts follow an artist's share of total streams, not a fixed per-play rate.
Q 10Which was the first song to pass one billion streams on Spotify, in December 2016?
'One Dance' by Drake
'One Dance' by Drake, from the album Views, was the first track to pass one billion Spotify streams, reaching the milestone that December about eight months after its release.
Q 11Whose single 'Thinking Out Loud' was the first song to pass 500 million Spotify streams, in October 2015?
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran's 'Thinking Out Loud', from the album x, was the first track to pass 500 million Spotify streams; a month later 'Lean On' by Major Lazer and DJ Snake overtook it as the most-streamed song.
Q 12Whose single 'Sad!' set a single-day streaming record of 10.4 million on 19 June 2018?
XXXTentacion
XXXTentacion's 'Sad!' surged the day after the rapper was shot dead in Florida on 18 June 2018, breaking the single-day record set ten months earlier by Taylor Swift's 'Look What You Made Me Do'.
Q 13Which artist was Spotify's most-streamed artist of the year for three straight years from 2020?
Bad Bunny
Q 21Alongside Gimlet Media, which podcast company did Spotify buy in February 2019?
Anchor
Anchor, a free podcast-hosting and creation platform, was bought alongside Gimlet in February 2019; its tools were folded into Spotify for Podcasters in 2023, and the Parcast purchase followed a month after the deal.
Q 22Whose podcast became a Spotify exclusive in 2020 in a deal reported at around $100 million or more?
Joe Rogan
The Joe Rogan Experience became a Spotify exclusive in September 2020 in a deal reported at $100 million or more; full episodes left YouTube that December and returned in 2024 under a new non-exclusive deal.
Q 23Which veteran rocker pulled his music from Spotify in 2022 over Joe Rogan's COVID episodes?
Neil Young
Bad Bunny was Spotify's most-streamed artist in 2020, 2021 and 2022, the first to take the title three years running, on the back of albums such as YHLQMDLG and El Último Tour del Mundo.
Q 14Who was the first artist to pass 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify?
The Weeknd
The Weeknd crossed 100 million monthly listeners in March 2023, the first artist to do so; Taylor Swift followed as the second artist and first woman, and Coldplay became the first group to cross the line.
Q 15As of early 2026, which artist was the most-followed on Spotify?
Arijit Singh
Arijit Singh, the Indian playback singer, became Spotify's most-followed artist in February 2024 and remained ahead in early 2026, a measure of the platform's growth in South Asia; Taylor Swift was the most-followed woman.
Q 16Which 2022 album was Spotify's most-streamed album of all time as of 2025?
Un Verano Sin Ti
Un Verano Sin Ti, released in May 2022, is a largely Spanish-language, reggaeton-heavy summer record; it was Spotify's most-streamed album of 2022 and sat top of the platform's all-time album ranking into 2025.
Q 17Spotify's personalised Monday playlist of unheard songs, launched in 2015, is called what?
Discover Weekly
Discover Weekly launched in July 2015 and delivers 30 personalised songs every Monday; within five months its tracks had been streamed 1.7 billion times, and the Friday counterpart Release Radar followed a year later.
Q 18In which year did Spotify first release its annual recap under the name Wrapped?
2016
Spotify Wrapped first appeared under that name in December 2016, replacing the 2015 retrospective and adding shareable personal cards that quickly made it a yearly social-media event.
Q 19What was the name of Spotify's 2015 forerunner to Wrapped?
Year in Music
Spotify's 2015 recap was called Year in Music, a web page of personal listening stats that was rebranded Wrapped the following year; in 2020 a former intern claimed credit for the later story format, which Spotify denied.
Q 20Spotify went public on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2018 using what unusual method?
A direct listing
In a direct listing no new shares are sold and no banks underwrite the deal; existing holders simply began trading, and the stock opened at $165.90 against a $132 reference price set by the exchange.
Neil Young pulled his catalogue in January 2022 after an open letter from 270 doctors and scientists about the podcast's COVID claims; Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren and Crosby, Stills & Nash followed.
Q 24Which sports and pop-culture site, founded by Bill Simmons, did Spotify agree to buy in February 2020?
The Ringer
The Ringer, which Simmons launched after ESPN closed his earlier site Grantland, went to Spotify for a reported price of up to $196 million; its staff had already unionised with the Writers Guild of America, East.
Q 25Which podcast, hosted by Alex Cooper, did Spotify sign to an exclusive deal in 2021?
Call Her Daddy
Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper's sex-and-relationships show, signed a three-year Spotify exclusive in June 2021 reported at $60 million; Cooper later moved to SiriusXM in a deal reported at $125 million.
Q 26Spotify's first hardware product, a voice-controlled dashboard gadget, was called what?
Car Thing
Car Thing, a small touchscreen with a voice-activated dial, went on limited sale in April 2021 at $79.99; Spotify stopped making it in July 2022 and remotely disabled every unit in December 2024.
Q 27At which singer's request did Spotify hide the shuffle button on album pages in November 2021?
Adele
Adele asked for the change to coincide with her album 30 in November 2021, arguing that albums are sequenced to tell a story; Spotify made play-in-order the default on album pages for Premium users.
Q 28Which Spanish football club made Spotify its shirt and stadium sponsor in 2022?
FC Barcelona
FC Barcelona agreed a four-year deal in 2022 reported at about €280 million, putting Spotify on the shirt and renaming the ground Spotify Camp Nou from the 2022–23 season.
Q 29Spotify's live-audio app, a Clubhouse rival launched in 2021, was first branded as Spotify what?
Greenroom
Spotify Greenroom launched in June 2021, rebuilt from Locker Room, the sports chat app bought from Betty Labs that March; it was renamed Spotify Live in 2022 and shut down in 2023.
Q 30Which South American country did Spotify say in 2023 it would leave over a new copyright law?
Uruguay
Uruguay's 2023 budget law added a right to 'fair and equitable' payment for performers; Spotify announced a phased exit from January 2024, then stayed after the government clarified that platforms would not pay twice.