Spotify Wrapped Was a Raging Success - DTNS 5203

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 10th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, Justin Robert Young explains a new bipartisan AI copyright transparency bill. And it's fun. Plus, Spotify's end of year wrapped campaign was a huge success, bigger than you might have thought. Apparently. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story.

0:35so spotify as all tech companies have been doing the last couple of weeks uh shared its fourth quarter earnings where it added a you know a few numbers here record 38 million users reaching 751 million monthly actives 290 million paid subscribers it's a lot of millions uh its end-of-year wrapped campaign engaged more than 300 million users. That's a ton of people that were impacted by that feature. That resulted in around 630 million social shares. So if you thought you were seeing everybody sharing it, you were right. They were. It was all over the map. Spotify did see a dip in its ad-supported business by around 4%, in part because of the slowing or or a slowing rather in its podcast ad business.

1:25But during the earnings call, Daniel Ek pitched Spotify as a technology platform. So kind of not just a music platform anymore, right? This technology platform, all types of audio and media and video, including new formats that he said had not been built yet. He's linking Spotify's next phase to, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, but also new interfaces, wearables, new discovery and consumption models, just kind of laying the groundwork, I guess, for new methods of interactivity with your music and your podcasts and content through Spotify. Daniel Ek going out on a high note. New co-CEOs Gustav Soderstrom and Alex Nordstrom taking over now.

2:11So this is Ek's last earnings call. uh and yeah i i think it is interesting to see where he has taken spotify from being a music business which it still primarily is uh to being a content business that's the kind of thing you want to do to diversify your revenue streams and make sure you continue to survive into the future uh not everything they have done has been a roaring success to your point the podcast ad market has not been bad in general but it was not great for spotify uh so i i think maybe they overextended there, but I don't think I wouldn't call it a failure. Honestly, Spotify wrapped is probably one of the most successful things they've ever done.

2:51The one time I open Spotify every year because I just have a free account is when I'm feeling wrapped jealousy and I open it in the vain hope that somehow I played a couple of songs this year and I'll have a wrapped that would be totally inaccurate. But I'm just curious to see if it's there. And it's starting to make me wonder they're starting to get that effect of like well everybody's using spotify my wife uses spotify uh everybody got has wrapped and they seem to be better at recommending songs they seem to get new releases right away whereas apple music sometimes have to wait 20 minutes to a half hour for it to show up i use youtube for music uh youtube video you know for music and i use apple music for audio uh but i'm i'm i'm starting to think like i don't know maybe i should switch to Spotify.

3:42They're at that point where they are the leader, the undisputed leader worldwide. Kind of ubiquitous choice. I mean, YouTube Music is great too. I've got both of them, primarily because we've got Spotify for each user in the house, but then my Spotify account ends up getting used by my kids enough that it totally wrecks all algorithmic anything. Your Spotify wrapped is not any particular person. Yeah, it did not represent me at all. Sure. But I have YouTube music as kind of like my siloed area that they don't touch. And you pay for YouTube premium to get rid of ads and stuff. So you can just get YouTube music anyway.

4:21So that's exactly it. I didn't sign up for it specifically for YouTube music, but because I get it, I end up using it. I never use YouTube music. I just watch music on YouTube, but then I get a YouTube music wrapped style thing at the end of the year. Anyway. Well, that's what I was going to say. YouTube, you know, YouTube music also has its own wrapped. I would love, you know, I didn't think to research this before the show. I wonder if YouTube or Google has shared, you know, kind of the success story of, of theirs. Maybe they will in response to this and be like, Hey, we had one too, and it did all these great things.

4:53Who the heck knows? But this also kind of reading through this and researching these earnings reminds me of kind of like thinking of Spotify less as a music service and more as a technology. technology platform and some of the things that they're doing that are kind of unique and interesting. Like we talked about not too long ago, the new feature where you can take a picture of a page in a book and it'll take you to that point in the audio book. That's pretty compelling, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not like a sea change sort of feature that's going to bring an insane amount of people over. It's certainly not wrapped level, but little technology kind of integrations like that.

5:35And I think telling the story of what he was saying, which is basically, we aren't just a music company anymore. We're doing really interesting things with that, with the AI DJ stuff, but everybody's messing around with AI. I feel like what Spotify has been mostly good at is taking logical steps. You listen to music? Well, then let's give you other things you listen to so you don't have to switch apps, audiobooks, podcasts. Oh, you like podcasts? Well, sometimes you might want to view the podcast. So let's give you the video podcast. They're not jumping straight to making their own original TV shows or anything, but they are taking steps that make sense.

6:14And in fact, the physical book one is a great example of that where you might wonder, why would a music service let me scan a book? But when you follow the like, oh, well, I listen to music and then I listen to audio books, but then sometimes I'm reading a book and I want the audiobook, especially if it's included in my subscription, and I could have the best of both worlds. Spotify is really good at following those trails of things to add something that may appear far afield from the original mission, but is close to what you've been using Spotify for. Yeah, and can also kind of rewrite your own habits and everything, right?

6:49When it comes to podcasts, I think that's largely been the case for a lot of people, is that before Spotify had any sort of podcast tendrils inside of it, you know, they were used to opening up their separate podcatcher and that sort of stuff. Like I know in, you know, one of our vehicles, we have a Model Y and it has from the very beginning that since we got it like four or five years ago, it had Spotify kind of integrated into the dash. And, and that was a service that I rarely ever used, but over time started to add podcasts there because it's just right there. I don't have to like side route You didn't have to pair something with Bluetooth and open a separate app.

7:28You just tap your dashboard, right? Totally. And Spotify, you won again, dang it. You got me. Yeah. I think it's under-celebrated sometimes how successful Spotify has been, especially when people talk about European tech companies. Often Spotify is the only one people can mention, but it is a hugely successful one and it is dominating music. let's see if the post-ec era can keep that momentum going. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. We are also available on Spotify. Thanks to Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, and Kirk Stephenson. Thanks, everybody.

8:16All right, there's plenty more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Yeah, this next one is a little bit of a wonky one. uh google issuing 100 year bonds and you may say why why do i care about that as a user of technology uh but i think it's significant uh because this lets google raise money from long term investors like insurance companies uh people who play it safe do not want to do short-term investing uh and it's a source of revenue that google or not revenue of fundraising that google would not have otherwise. It offers a very long horizon, but relatively safe IOU, given those investors a bond that matches their long-term horizons.

8:59And of course, assuming that Google's going to be around 100 years from now, which I think the other side they get from this is sort of the cachet of being able to say, we got people to buy a 100-year bond from us because they are that confident that Alphabet will continue to be around in 100 years. That's a good point. Now, you may say, well, wait a minute, why do they need to raise this cash? Is Google hurting for money? No,$100 billion in cash and equivalents that they're sitting on. But companies often want to keep cash for other reasons. So if you can raise the money with a 100-year bond, it's not going to increase your debt load because it's such a long horizon.

9:38And it gives you more flexibility. It can keep your cash for buybacks and acquisitions and any unexpected stuff that happens while you use that cheap long-term debt to finance some of your current priorities, which, of course, are using that money to build out capacity for your data centers and your large language models and Gemini and all that stuff. And I mean, that's a big pressure that big tech companies like Google are facing right now is the sudden need, whether it's an actual need or they think they need it, and then we find out later they didn't. But definitely right now, they're all on the hunt to do these massive data center build outs, and that's pretty darn costly.

10:19What is not, I don't think, reasonably disputable is that these companies are at capacity for what they're doing now. OpenAI has been very public about the chart that shows every time they've added compute capacity, their revenue has gone up. They're not trying to say that will happen forever. There will be a ceiling at some point. But none of these companies are at a point where they don't need more compute. The question is about how much more do they need? And to bring it back to this story. I think what Google is saying is we are a little uncertain about what's going to happen. So we don't want to exhaust our cash reserves for this.

11:01And if people will bet on a hundred-year bond with us, then we should do it. Now, once I read through this, I was like, okay, so let's go back in time. We're going to go back in time a hundred years ago. What are the companies 100 years ago that were in google's place that did not survive and came up with a few names at least sears very dominant retailer way back when still around now around but still a pretty tiny player uh you know comparatively speaking um kind of along similar line like kodak right still around fraction of its influence but once a major major player pan am in the the flight industry that collapsed in 1991.

11:44Yeah, Pan Am is a brand, a fashion brand. Right. Yeah, that's right. That's right. But I mean, do you think that Google has any threat of not being around 100 years? I don't know. 100 years is a long freaking time. IBM was founded in 1888. Still kicking. AT &T has survived through a lot of stuff. the national broadcasting company the walt disney company uh these are these are all hundred years so yeah uh alphabet betton they are more ibm and disney than they are kodak and pan am yes yes yes well uh the time has come for chat gpt free and go users ads are rolling out to those users here in the u.s anyways they're limited to logged in adult users uh will exclude sensitive topics like health, mental health, politics.

12:40And OpenAI is saying that the ads will not affect or impact the answers and will actually appear visually distinct in the process. You can dismiss them if you want. Free users will also be able to hide all ads by accepting fewer daily messages. So there's an option there. Users can opt into targeted ads. So if you're okay with that based on the chat content, then there you go. OpenAI says that advertisers only see aggregated performance data. They're not going to see personal details. They're not going to see the conversational content of wherever those ads appear. OpenAI also says that integrating ads at the lower levels is helpful to maintaining its infrastructure, its investments.

13:26And yeah, users in the upper tiers can rest assured, at least for now anyways, the experience is going to remain ad-free. So I actually fired up a free account because I have a paid account. And then I have another one that happened to be my free account before I ever paid for it. And I was like, I'm going to go in there. I'm going to see some ads. And I could not trigger an ad. I don't know if you can counter that. They're rolling out. They haven't rolled out. So your mileage may vary on that. And if I'm guessing they're going to be very light touch in how many ads they serve at the beginning so that this doesn't flood people.

14:04Um, they, you know, yes, they are integrating ads to help maintain infrastructure also called making money. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you use money for is to maintain your infrastructure. Uh, so yeah, I, I thought the anthropic ads in the super bowl were highly entertaining uh but i get why open ai is like they that that's not what we're doing uh and they're gonna be hard pressed to make that clear that that's not what we're they're doing until people actually see this stuff uh but this is no this is going to be less burdensome than the ads you normally see on free published blogs and news organizations so yeah at least for now at least I totally agree.

14:47I did, in interacting with FreeChatGPT, it did tell me about what it thought ChatGPT ads would be like. And it said, when you get them, you'll be able to click an about this ad so you can learn why it was shown. And then ChatGPT also told me that users can ask ChatGPT to bring that ad into the chat for discussion. So you can interact with that ad. Or ChatGPT was totally lying to me i was gonna say possible especially the first one i'd like did you check that to see if that's yeah uh and i'm sure some people will uh most people won't i think the people are going to complain the most are the ones on the go plan where they're paying eight dollars and they're like why am i also seeing ads but yeah that's always the thing uh blue sky has added a new draft feature to its micro blogging service uh this is something users have wanted for a long time, lets you save an unfinished post and then go back later and finish it.

15:43You can access drafts by starting a new post, tapping the drafts button in the top right corner of the composer. The new update version 1.116 has it. Also brings support for auto-playing GIFs. Yeah. Okay. So Blue Sky continues to kind of bring some of these features. It's been a couple of years strong here. I'm not like insanely active on blue sky, but I don't necessarily feel like features like this are, are keeping me away from it. I think it's just general social media. All of them, uh, different friends of mine are on different platforms, you know? So I, I kind of dip in and out. I, I tend to find when I post the same thing across platforms that threads and X are the ones with the most trolls blue sky, just as kind of intellectually judgy, and mastodon is the most like literal and analytic in the result i think you're absolutely spot on um yeah because i i noticed some very similar things um as far as blue sky is concerned you know it's still missing other features but they're kind of you know patching it together over time private account support is missing support for longer videos they have a short video So, yeah, just video shorts support in there, but not for longer videos.

17:04Yeah, and the promise of Blue Sky will be when it becomes more federated the way Mastodon's system is. And that still hasn't really taken off. Blue Sky itself is still the dominant place to post on Blue Sky. Indeed. Well, folks, if you want honest reviews from people who actually buy and live with tech, we've got Sarah Lane. uh, check out live with it. Sarah hosts it every week, uh, with Roger Chang and guests. Uh, she'll either be talking about something she's been living with, or she may have someone, uh, like this week, uh, Roger, Joe, and I are all talking about using Opus clip, uh, on live with it.

17:43Go watch it. It's not just services. It's, uh, we talked about the X reel glasses in the past. Uh, Hammond talked about the tour box. Uh, we've had rich Stroffalino on talking about digital cameras. Uh, it's always a different product. Always interesting and always us actually talking about stuff we own. Go check it out wherever you get your podcasts or a youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

18:09All right. Quick headlines time. These are good to know if you want to, you know, look smart in front of all of your peers in the future. Yeah. So you can be like, oh, did you know WhatsApp is testing end to end encrypted voice and video calling along with screen sharing and its browser app? You didn't know that? No. I had no idea. You're amazing. How did you know that? OpenAI has dropped the I.O. name of its upcoming unreleased and unannounced AI hardware expected in 2027. This was revealed thanks to a court filing in a trademark lawsuit with a startup with a similar name spelled I.Y.O. That means they're giving up in that case, and they're going to pick another name.

18:51I'll be curious what they end up naming it, though. Yeah, me too. So Rivian is releasing an Apple Watch app that brings remote control and digital key support to the entire lineup. So you can just use your watch to unlock your car. Yeah, I think on the version one Rivian vehicle, you have to have the screen on in order to do it. But for the rest of them, the screen on your watch can be off. Tapity tap. Tap. YouTube Music is letting users spin up on-demand playlists using text or voice prompts and a new feature rolling out to premium subscribers. Gemini on the Android desktop will be an always-on assistant with a persistent status bar icon along with a Google key and space bar shortcut.

19:35This according to some insight found in the APK by Android Authority. Cisco introduced its new 102.4 terabytes per second silicon 1G300 switch. It's a challenge to Broadcom and NVIDIA in the hyperscaler space. The UK is entrusting Apple and Google to police their own app stores with non-binding pledges. Pause. A fair treatment from both companies. This is not as strict as the regulation in the EU. We promise we'll do something. But don't hold us to. That's right. But China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., aka SMIC, had a strong earnings quarter on solid chip demand, but warned that growth and margins will flatten as depreciation on new fabs and yield issues are driving up costs.

20:29Yeah, they did as much as they can to look really good in the domestic market. But, oh, wait, you can buy NVIDIA chips now? Crap. That's my interpretation. Russian watchdog Roskomnadzor has begun throttling access to Telegram. And plans broader limits this week, according to unnamed sources to RBC News Service. And this is in relation to Telegram not handing over certain data to the government that they wanted. Finally, Nike is building a battery-powered leg and sneaker system called Project Amplify that learns your gait and pushes your feet forward. Think of it as like an e-bike for your feet.

21:12That's so weird. Are they going to be like lime scooters where I can just walk out and stick my feet in one? Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, Utah Republican Senator John Curtis, both of them introduced the Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act that would require companies to file a notice with the Register of Copyrights that details the copyright. works used to train data sets for any AI model before it launches, also as well as previously launched models would be under this as well. The filings would be made available in a public database.

21:56Tom, you checked in with Justin Robert Young from Politics, Politics, Politics about how this came about and why. Justin Robert Young, there's only one thing I enjoy talking with you about more than journalism and that's copyright. Ah, yeah. So many copyrighted conversations that we have had over the years. So explain to me why a Democrat, Adam Schiff, Senator Adam Schiff, and a Republican, Senator John Curtis, have decided to push a bill that doesn't do anything but require paperwork. So you're familiar with the state of California, right, Tom? I am. I'm in it right now. Okay, good. So you know that there's two major metropolitan areas that dominate California and they have two separate industries, right?

22:50Yes, San Diego and Sacramento. You have the entertainment industry in LA and you have the tech industry in San Francisco. If you were to describe the current fortunes of those two industries, how would you, if you were to ascribe an arrow pointing up or an arrow pointing down to the entertainment industry and the tech industry in terms of capital investment, how would you describe that? I would exhaust the ink in my Sharpie for the down for entertainment and likewise for the up for technology. this is adam schiff and the republican that's involved in this is kind of inconsequential every once in a while republicans and democrats that get along with certain things will just uh put their names on it so this can break through the partisan rhetoric and look like something that is bipartisan but this is adam schiff's big play okay he wants much of the fact that don't make too much of the bipartisan side of this adam schiff wants san francisco to pay Los Angeles.

23:55He is a Los Angeles based politician. He wants that to happen. And the way that you get that to happen, both from a private and a public point of view in terms of legislation is to say, we are going to make sure that everything that has ever been put into an LLM is vetted for copyright. We're going to sue you or have the government declaration, a government declaration to force everything that has been put into a training model to then be listed for copyright so we can then retroactively get people paid. I think that this is probably at some point the money is going to get so large in San Francisco.

24:39You've already seen a co-opting of Hollywood by tech in a lot of different ways. This is probably going to be another way that that gets subsidized. But this is essentially a industry forward piece of legislation from Adam Schiff on behalf of Hollywood against Silicon Valley. And you think it's a step one because it doesn't force them to do anything yet, but it gathers the information so that if they can get enough momentum for a step two to make the tech companies pay, they have all the information they need to do that. There is reporting around this, but it is legend in Silicon Valley that when the GPTs that eventually reshaped our entire economy from open AI were first coming into fruition, one of the biggest things that was put forth not only by the leadership then, but also the leadership that is now anthropic in Dario Amodi was based on the idea of bigger, bigger bigger bigger bigger is better we need to train these uh models on more compute than we have ever seen before and we need to give it more information than we ever had before and they were not picky about what went into that those first training models now the models have trained themselves for for years and years and years but there are current lawsuits that are happening And Tom, what do you suspect would happen if there were now a master copyright list of everything that went in to the first models that eventually would make what we see now with chat GPT?

26:15Do you think it would result in lawsuits? I think bailiffs might quit over the amount of work that they would need to do. So, yeah, I do think that it is step one. I think that it is essentially an industry driven piece of legislation because Hollywood is dying and Silicon Valley is exploding. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And it makes sense why they make sure to make this retroactive. Usually with the new law, they say from now on, it's this way. But this one made sure to say this also applies to every model that has ever been created. Because by the way, the philosophy in training the best models has kind of gone away from this idea that you need to feed it more and more and more of the internet.

27:00Now you can synthetically train it to know certain things and then have it reference other stuff on the internet that is publicly available. And you can make a law that says you have to document what you did. It will be harder for them to make a law that says what you did in the past is now illegal because you can argue in court like, well, we didn't know that. There wasn't a law when we did it. But it certainly does make it easier to have these lawsuits come along and say, well, no, the law should have applied in that way. Justin, thanks for helping us wrap our head around this. Before we go, real quickly, the other thing fueling an AI debate is data centers and power management and the fear that building a lot of new data centers, which is what all these companies are doing, will drive up electric prices.

27:47The United States administration, according to reporting, going to put out some voluntary guidelines, again, not forcing anything, but saying we want to put public pressure on these companies to not do anything that will raise electric prices. We talked about that on PX3, but give people a little preview on where we're going with that conversation. In fact, I'll give you something that we didn't talk about on PX3, which is that's what the companies want people to know. The executive order and the guidance that the Trump administration is going to put out, the companies were – what they wanted the most out of the Trump administration was regulatory relaxation to say that they could create their own power.

28:32because they knew that the current power generation for the electrical grids were not going to be what they needed. They needed to create more power. And so this is PR for the companies. The companies want it to be out there. They're like, yes, please hold us accountable to generate our own power that we were actively lobbying you a year and a half ago to make sure that we were able to do. Well, if folks want to hear that longer conversation that you and I had, where are they going to go? So they're going to go to politics, politics, politics.com. Thanks, Justin. See you later. Thank you, Justin.

29:07Yeah. The retroactive quality of that. That's the real, the real. Yeah. No, I think, I think it's a good insight that like this, this is basically a billboard that says, if you would like to sue search here, that's going to be real. It's just introduced by the way. We should say like this was introduced. It may become law. I'm not trying to, you know, pour cold water on its chances, but it has to go to committees and get approved. So it's not going to become law fast if it does. Yeah, at this stage, nothing is a done deal until it's a done deal. So we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives.

29:41And today, Andrew responds to the study on how generative tools are causing people to feel like they can work more. Yeah, Andrew said, wow, did I feel that story about LLM's intensifying work deeply. As I've blended AI-assisted coding tools into my daily work, I find an increasing pull to open one more AI window while waiting for my last prompt to finish. I've hit a hard wall more than once on task switching already. I have to tell myself to stop and focus on only one thing at a time to complete it. And he talks about how this was similar to continuous integration servers when they first hit. He says, on my current team, I intentionally invite people to come to lunch during our in-office days as a forcing function against coding interminably.

30:27when i'm at home i've got more interested in walking the dog midday or taking breaks to do yard work okay so i have not read this story firsthand but i can kind of gather where it's going and just just through this description and boy do i feel that that like need to like continue to open up windows and fire things off and because it's never quite you're not working it's not hard it's doing all the work right totally totally rolling and rolling and rolling Oh, God, I feel that so deeply. Well, folks, if you've got insights like this, we'd love to hear them. Send us an email, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

31:02That's feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah, thank you, Andrew, for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

31:23The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.