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.

Rani Molla

Let Tim Cook

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China

The memory crunch has made iPhones a more popular alternative as competitors’ prices rise.

Jon Keegan2h

Microsoft loses exclusive access to OpenAI’s models and tools while ending revenue-sharing deal with ChatGPT maker

Microsoft shares dropped as it announced a revised agreement with OpenAI.

The amended agreement ends revenue-sharing payments from Microsoft to OpenAI, and also ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property (i.e. models and products).

OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

Amazon, a likely beneficiary of this lack of exclusivity, initially popped on the news but erased those gains.

This is a developing story.

The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog

Rani Molla3h

China just blew up one of Meta’s key AI bets

China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese startup (since relocated to Singapore) that makes AI agents and was central to Meta’s push to turn its massive AI investments into a real business. The move is part of the Chinese government’s effort to stop US firms from gaining access to Chinese talent and intellectual property, as Washington continues to restrict sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.

Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

Jon Keegan4/24/26

DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

$28.5T

Rani Molla4/24/26

SpaceX thinks its total addressable market (TAM) is a whopping $28.5 trillion for its businesses, according to an S-1 filing for its upcoming IPO reviewed by Reuters. And most of that market isn’t rockets. The company says roughly 90% could come from AI — largely selling artificial intelligence tools to businesses.

“We believe that our enterprise strategy, which is focused on serving the digital needs of the world’s largest industries with Al solutions, positions us competitively to pursue this rapidly ⁠growing opportunity,” SpaceX said in the filing. “We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history.”

TAM, of course, assumes capturing every possible customer. But even a small slice of a $28.5 trillion market would be enormous.