131/264 proof of ownership following the settlement, and (v) reserving future royalties for unmatched tracks. The final approval hearing was held on December 1, 2017 and the court has not yet issued a ruling. Even if the settlement is finally approved, we may still be subject to claims of copyright infringement by rights holders who have purported to opt out of the settlement or who may not otherwise be covered by its terms. For example, since July 2017, six lawsuits alleging unlawful reproduction and distribution of musical compositions have been filed against us in (i) the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee ( Bluewater Music Services Corporation v. Spotify USA Inc. , No. 3:17­cv­01051; Gaudio et al. v. Spotify USA Inc. , No. 3:17­cv­01052; Robertson et al. v. Spotify USA Inc. , No. 3:17­cv­01616; and A4V Digital, Inc. et al. v. Spotify USA Inc. , 3:17­cv­01256), (ii) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida ( Watson Music Group, LLC v. Spotify USA Inc. , No. 0:17­cv­62374), and (iii) the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ( Wixen Music Publishing Inc. v. Spotify USA, Inc. , 2:17­cv­09288) (alleging that Spotify has infringed the copyrights in over 10,000 musical compositions). The complaints seek an award of damages, including the maximum statutory damages allowed under U.S. copyright law of $150,000 per work infringed. We intend to vigorously defend the claims. Property and Equipment Spotify’s principal operational offices are located in Stockholm, Sweden under a lease for approximately 230,000 square feet of office space, expiring on September 30, 2027. We also lease regional offices in New York, New York; Los Angeles, California; San Francisco, California; Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Seattle, Washington; Atlanta, Georgia; Miami, Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; and Washington D.C. We also lease other offices in Sweden and lease office space in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, India, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Singapore, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Poland, and Taiwan. In February 2017, we entered into a 17­year lease to occupy approximately 380,000 square feet of office space in New York, New York which will replace our existing office space and will serve as our North American headquarters. In June 2017, we exercised an option on the lease in order to occupy an additional 101,000 square feet of office space. While the majority of our computing needs are serviced from our cloud infrastructure, we have data centers located in London, United Kingdom; Stockholm, Sweden; and Ashburn, Virginia. The data centers host the www.spotify.com website and intranet applications that are used to manage the website content. The data centers are designed to be fault­tolerant, with a collection of identical web servers connecting to an enterprise database. The design also includes load balancers, firewalls and routers that connect the components and provide connections to the internet. The failure of any individual component is not expected to affect the overall availability of our website. Currently, we are in the process of transitioning all of our data storage (including personal data of Users and music data licensed from rights holders) and computing from our own servers to GCP. We believe that our current facilities are adequate to meet our needs for the near future and that suitable additional or alternative space will be available on commercially reasonable terms to accommodate our foreseeable future operations. Employees In 2016 and 2017, we had 2,084 and 2,960 full­time employees on average, respectively. The following table describes our average number of employees by department per fiscal year: December 31, 2016 2017 Content Production and Customer Service 163 206 Sales and Marketing 664 865 Research and Development 959 1,463 General and Administrative 298 426 124