As they say in the article, they are trying to serve a global audience. As is easily googlable, Spotify was developed in the Baltic; the developer's own names likely contain non-ASCII characters.
Interesting, I felt foolish about an hour after having written this post, realizing that in most scenarios, it really shouldn't ever be any amount of effort minus half a second of planning and felt foolish for writing off unicode. (Normally I go the other route, unicode all the things).
I suppose I feel that I was probably right to call myself arrogant then, to find out what you noted about Spotify's creators/creation. Interesting, thanks for the perspective check
I don't think you were all wrong - there's a difference between username and name. My name has a space in it, but they won't allow me to represent that in the username. And if my name is already used by someone else as their username, I can't use it as mine. This doesn't bother me, so long as my name is displayed properly in the UI (if at all).
