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 warned in an open letter that it might have to move abroad unless housing, tax and education laws changed.
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: the pair were calling out names from different rooms, and only later explained 'Spotify' as a blend of 'spot' and 'identify'.
Q 04Which shut-down file-sharing service gave Ek the idea for Spotify around 2002?
Napster
Napster's collapse 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 music industry.
Q 05Before Spotify launched, Ek was briefly chief executive of which file-sharing 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, then the world's third-largest music market, did Spotify reach only in March 2012?
Germany
Germany got Spotify on 13 March 2012, more than three years after smaller markets such as France and Spain, which had it from the October 2008 launch.
Q 07Which tech founder posted 'Spotify is so good' in 2009?
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook status came two years before Spotify reached the United States, and in September 2011 the two companies announced a partnership that let users play Spotify's music inside Facebook.
Q 08Spotify's model of an ad-supported tier with paid upgrades is known by what term?
Freemium
Freemium has had its limits: in 2011 Spotify cut long-term free listeners to ten hours a month, then scrapped every time limit in January 2014.
Q 09Spotify divides its payouts among rights holders according to what?
Share of all streams
Share of all streams sets each cut, with no fixed rate per play, so what finally reaches an artist depends on the deal they signed with their label or distributor.
Q 10Which was the first song to pass one billion streams on Spotify, in December 2016?
'One Dance' by Drake
'One Dance' by Drake reached a billion plays about eight months after its April 2016 release, and it got there without a music video to push it.
Q 11Which artist had the first song to pass 500 million Spotify streams, in October 2015?
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran's 'Thinking Out Loud' got there first, but held the record for only a month before 'Lean On' by Major Lazer and DJ Snake became Spotify's most-streamed song.
Q 12Which rapper set a Spotify single-day streaming record the day after he was shot dead in June 2018?
XXXTentacion
XXXTentacion's 'Sad!' drew 10.4 million plays on 19 June 2018; weeks earlier Spotify had dropped him from its playlists under a 'hateful conduct' policy it then abandoned.
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-making app did Spotify buy in February 2019?
Anchor
Anchor, an app for creating podcasts, was bought together with Gimlet in February 2019; the crime network Parcast followed a month later as Spotify built a podcast business.
Q 22Whose podcast became a Spotify exclusive in 2020 in a deal reported at around $100 million or more?
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan's show arrived on Spotify in September 2020 and went exclusive that December; a new deal in February 2024 ended the exclusivity and returned it to other platforms.
Q 23Which veteran rocker pulled his music from Spotify in 2022 over COVID claims aired on its biggest podcast?
Neil Young
Bad Bunny took the title in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and in the middle year he drew more than 9.1 billion streams without releasing a new album.
Q 14Who was the first artist to pass 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify?
The Weeknd
The Weeknd passed 100 million monthly listeners in late February 2023, days after Ariana Grande joined him on a remix of 'Die for You'; Taylor Swift became the second artist there that August.
Q 15As of early 2026, which artist was the most-followed on Spotify?
Arijit Singh
Arijit Singh, the Indian playback singer, overtook Taylor Swift in August 2024 although she drew more than twice his monthly listeners; by January 2026 he had about 171 million followers.
Q 16Which 2022 album was Spotify's most-streamed album of all time as of 2025?
Un Verano Sin Ti
Un Verano Sin Ti was Spotify's most-streamed album of 2022 and then, a year after its release, of 2023 as well, a repeat that helped carry it to the top of the all-time list.
Q 17Spotify's personalised Monday playlist of unheard songs, launched in 2015, is called what?
Discover Weekly
Discover Weekly arrived in July 2015, three weeks after a major rival service launched: a two-hour mix refreshed each Monday, likened by Spotify to a best friend making you a mixtape.
Q 18For years, Spotify Wrapped stopped counting a user's listening around which holiday?
Halloween
Halloween marked the cutoff: Wrapped arrives around the start of December but long counted only 1 January to 31 October, so two months of listening never made the recap.
Q 19What was the name of Spotify's 2015 forerunner to Wrapped?
Year in Music
Year in Music was the 2015 recap, renamed Wrapped the following December; in 2020 a former intern said she had devised its story format, a claim Spotify denied.
Q 20Spotify went public in April 2018 using what unusual method?
A direct listing
A direct listing sold no new shares: Spotify was not raising money, so early investors and staff simply began selling the stock they already held on the open market.
Neil Young pulled his catalogue in January 2022 after 270 doctors and scientists wrote an open letter about the podcast's COVID claims; Joni Mitchell followed him within days.
Q 24Which sports and pop-culture site, founded by Bill Simmons, did Spotify agree to buy in February 2020?
The Ringer
The Ringer was launched by Simmons in 2016 with editors from Grantland, his earlier ESPN-owned site; six months before the sale its staff voted to unionise with the Writers Guild of America, East.
Q 25Which Barstool Sports podcast did Spotify lure away in 2021 with an exclusive deal reported at $60 million?
Call Her Daddy
Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper's advice and comedy show, left Barstool for Spotify in June 2021; three years later Cooper moved on 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 reached its first users in April 2021 and general sale in February 2022; Spotify stopped making it that July, and its 2024 plan to switch every unit off that December drew a class action and refunds.
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 put Spotify on its shirts and renamed its ground Spotify Camp Nou from 2022; the shirt logo sometimes gives way to an artist's own, as with Travis Scott's, to promote new music.
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 the sports chat app Locker Room after Spotify bought its maker 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 passed a law in 2023 promising performers fairer pay; Spotify said it would shut its service there early in 2024, then reversed course weeks later once the government clarified the law.