When everyone who’s gonna subscribe is already subscribed there’s one easy way to keep earnings going up and to the right: raise prices. It’s already happened in Europe, and now it’s coming to the US. What cost $9.99/mth at launch 14 years ago is now $11.99, and soon will cost… we’ll find out before March is done.
[Financial Times]
In September, the band announced it would remove its catalog from Spotify due to Daniel Ek’s investment in military AI technology. That appears to be easier said than done. But in 2026, it will begin releasing music on a new label, and the group said it will be available digitally — just not on Spotify.
A spokesperson tells Variety that the integration will arrive in the “coming weeks,” allowing users to go back and forth between listening to a song and watching the music video. Spotify brought music videos to countries outside the US last year with support for select artists, including Charlie XCX, Doja Cat, Ed Sheeran, and others.
Spotify hasn’t launched a native app for Amazon’s new Vega OS yet, so Amazon built a clunky workaround for the first Fire TV stick running Vega.
Premium users can ask the AI feature for music suggestions in Spanish and type out descriptions of what they want to hear, in addition to the existing support for verbal English-language requests.
The only human-made element behind Xania Monet’s act appear to be the lyrics.
Every Friday, Spotify will release “The Drop,” where its editors highlight the latest in music in a series of scrollable, vertical video clips. You can find the new series on the app’s homepage or by searching “The Drop Weekly.”
A new Spotify integration will let you connect your account to Waymo, allowing you to play your favorite tunes while the robotaxi takes you to your destination. Waymo also offers the ability to cast music, as well as listen to a selection of curated radio stations.
For an additional $11.99 per month, the Audiobook Plus add-on enables Spotify subscribers or members on Duo and Family plans to add 15 hours of audiobook listening time, on top of the 15 hours already included in Spotify Premium subscriptions — which can only be accessed by the account holder. The add-on was launched in other regions last month.
Google first announced an overhauled Spotify app for Android Auto back at I/O 2025, and 9to5Google reports that it’s now arrived. Spotify Premium users can start Jam sessions in their cars, allowing even free users to join in and add songs to a shared queue.
The app’s had a wider redesign too, with a more prominent section for downloaded tracks and proper support for Spotify’s search functionality.
If you’re still waiting for Spotify’s lossless audio offering, Chris Messina notes that the 9.0.58 update that rolled out a couple of days ago on Android has new changes hinting at the feature for settings tied to cellular downloading and checking storage space.
It’s similar to what we saw last month, but after all these years, how long will it take to turn into something everyone can use?
[bsky.app]
Drummer Greg Saunier explains the moral calculus behind leaving the biggest streaming platform.
Ek’s investment company Prima Materia dumped its first €100 million in Helsing, the German defense tech group with roots in AI software, back in 2021. Now it’s leading a €600 million round to capitalize on the shift to drone warfare. Per the Financial Times:
“The world is being tested in more ways than ever before. That has sped up the timeline” for Helsing’s financing, Ek said, pointing in particular to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, where drones and other AI-powered systems have been deployed at scale for the first time. “There’s an enormous realisation that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield.”
Yesterday, a global outage on the Google Cloud platform knocked out Google Home, Spotify, Snapchat, and even some Cloudflare features, and today the company released a mini incident report as it continues to investigate.
For Cloudflare’s part, its report says the Google failure took out a central data store for one of its services.
From our initial analysis, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected. To recover we bypassed the offending quota check, which allowed recovery in most regions within 2 hours. However, the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region.
