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.
