Spotify (un)Wrapped: Plotting the Swedish streamer's progress

12/1/22 7:00PM

Spotify (un)Wrapped

‍If you’ve been on social media in the last 48 hrs, you’re now no doubt familiar with the listening habits of your nearest and dearest.

The music tech company’s Wrapped — one of our favorite uses of data storytelling that gets widespread coverage — is a good reminder of Spotify’s dominance in the industry. Despite competing with a trio of tech giants in Apple, Amazon and Google (through YouTube), the Swedish company remains the world’s largest music streaming service, counting more than 450 million users at the end of its latest quarter.

‍Freemium forever

‍‍60% of those users, 273 million in total, remain on Spotify’s free service. Those users get access to Spotify’s enormous music library at the cost of being bombarded with 15-30 second adverts every few songs. But, as frequent as those ads may feel for listeners, they are a tiny part of Spotify’s business. Spotify’s paid users brought in nearly €2.7bn in revenue in the latest quarter, ads brought in roughly one-seventh of that.

It would be hard to call Spotify a startup, given the company is in its 16th year of operations (with 4 as a public company), but on some measures it still looks like one, having not converted progress into steady profits. After payments to artists, labels, publishers and agents, Spotify makes a 25% margin. That margin then goes on overheads, research & development, sales & marketing and admin costs — in fact Spotify has lost ~€1.1bn since 2019, with the company ending up in the red for 10 of the last 15 quarters.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5