Spotify announced today (July 14th) that it will make the service accessible in Russia and several other countries from July 15th, including Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and Northern Macedonia along with Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Serbia, Slovenia and Ukraine (via Music Business Woldwide, Yahoo! News and Bunisess Wire).

"The launch enabled nearly 250 million people to discover new music from around the world thanks to Spotify, as well as local artists to reach a global audience," said Gustav Gyllenhammar, Spotify's vice president.

Spotify, founded in Sweden in 2006, is a music streaming service and other media services. The platform is a freemium service (free & premium) - which means it is offered for free, but also a premium that includes all products and services offered for a fee. The free service offers music and other limited services as well as features automatic music ads and videos. Other features - such as ad-free listening - are offered through paid subscriptions.

Since 2008, Spotify has provided access to over 50 million songs. Users can browse projects by artist, band, album or genre as well as create, modify or share playlists. Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world with more subscribers - 96 million. The platform has about 170 million users in total.