When the Swedish music streaming platform Spotify was first becoming successful, all the news outlets reporting on it were told that the name was a combination of spot and identify. That sounds plausible enough, but it was actually a lie to cover up a slightly embarrassing mistake. The truth is, when founders Martin Lorentzon and Daniel Ek were trying to come up with names, they were literally just trying to make it catchy. After failing to get anything substantial from online jargon generators, they resorted to just shouting out random words to each other and checking if they were taken. At one point, Lorentzon asked Ek to look up a word that he misheard as "Spotify". When it returned no results on Google, they just decided to go with it. Now it has over 400 million hits and has been continuously increasing in searches since its founding in 2006.
1 Comment
5/6/2020 12:05:16 pm
Thanks for this interesting history behind Spotify!! I have come across your website/blog today while searching for the root word for virus and virtual. You are truly a etymologist!! Keep going and all the best!!
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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