121/264 songwriters, and the creator community which collectively give us the ability to bring their vision to life. The multiple functions of creator services align cross­functionally and throughout Spotify globally to support creators both on and off the platform in reaching their full potential. Our Content Strategy Users come to Spotify primarily to listen to music they love and to discover new music they will enjoy from among the over 35 million tracks available on our Service as of December 31, 2017, which grows by approximately 20 thousand recordings a day. At its core, Spotify’s platform leverages our deep User engagement, rich data, and artificial intelligence to optimize the content matching process between artists on our platform and Users who are likely to be their fans and engage with their content. We believe our platform is extendable to additional forms of content. We are investing in expanding our non­music content with podcasts and other forms of spoken word audio content, as well as original video content appropriate to our Service. We intend to focus on short­form and interstitial content. We believe that unlocking our extensive catalog of music and spoken word audio content through a highly personalized User experience that drives discovery is critical to the continued fast growth of our Service. One of our strengths and one of our challenges for consumers is that we have an overwhelming amount of content available on our Service for consumers to choose from. In order to better utilize that content, we need to be able to help individual Spotify Users find the content they will love, and we need to help the content find its target audience. We believe this is an important factor in maintaining our market leadership and competitive position. The vast majority of the content we offer to Users is licensed to Spotify on a non­exclusive basis. We believe that personalization, not exclusivity, is key to our continued success. In addition, because we provide artists with access to millions of Users around the world, many artists independently choose to release content on our Service, even if they initially provided this content exclusively on another Service. Securing favorable licensing terms with the record companies is key to the long­term success of our business model. In 2017, we renegotiated contracts with the major labels—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—and with Merlin, which represents the digital rights on behalf of numerous independent record labels. Since we have expanded to 61 countries and territories around the world, we have realized that each culture and geography has its own unique listening habits, content, and preferences. We have developed a bespoke strategy for each market, incorporating the unique music traditions of each locale. We are acutely focused on developing relationships with local artists and record companies so that we can integrate them into the Spotify ecosystem. This localization is an important component of our strategy for launching in new markets and further growing our users globally. Our Technology We are focused on continuously improving our technology. By investing heavily in research and development and constantly innovating and improving our platform, we ensure that Spotify can deliver a high­quality User experience at scale. As of December 31, 2017, more than 40% of our employees are engineers, and we expect engineers to represent a significant portion of our employees over the foreseeable future. We also opportunistically make strategic acquisitions, such as our purchases of MightyTV, a content recommendation service which will help us improve the content we recommend to our Users, Niland, an artificial intelligence technology company which will help us optimize music search and recommendation capabilities, Sonalytic, makers of an audio detection technology that can aid in music discovery by helping us identify songs, mixed content, and audio clips, Soundtrap, an online music studio which will help us facilitate music creation by artists we work with, and The Echo Nest Corporation, a leading music intelligence company with in­depth musical understanding and tools that helps us drive music discovery for Users. 114