Spotify Newsletter #291
Your Weekly Dose of Spotify News
★ SPOTlight
⭐️ Spotify Adds Record Monthly Users and Hits 290 Million Paid Subscribers in Q4, New Co-CEO Says 2026 Will Be ‘Year of Raising Ambition’
Daniel Ek, in prepared remarks with the Q4 earnings announcement, said Spotify has effectively built “a technology platform for audio — and increasingly, for all the ways creators connect with audiences.” He said the company will “keep building the technology” for “the hard problems ahead,” citing major tech shifts like AI and wearables.
⭐️ Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI
Has AI coding reached a tipping point? That seems to be the case for Spotify at least, which shared this week during its fourth-quarter earnings call that the best developers at the company “have not written a single line of code since December.” That statement, from Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström, came alongside other comments about how the company is using AI to accelerate development.
⭐️ Reading Was Never Meant to Sit Still
Owen Smith, Spotify’s VP of Audiobooks, on how Spotify is bringing physical books and audiobooks together so stories fit more naturally into everyday life, no matter how you read.
⭐️ Spotify is testing a bold new look for its Wear OS app
A redesigned “Now Playing” screen puts album art front and center, while introducing gesture controls for playback.
⭐️ Spotify CEO delivers strong message on its future
“Spotify enters this next chapter from a position of strength, aiming to build the first truly intelligent media platform,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne in a research report shared with TheStreet. “We anticipate more product tied specifically to leveraging AI and enhancing personalization.”
⭐️ How We Release the Spotify App: A Look Under the Hood
In Part 1 of “How We Release the Spotify App”, we gave an overview of how the Spotify release process works. In Part 2, we will peek under the hood at the tooling that makes it possible. To understand where we are today, it’s useful to give some historical context of how the current solution came to be.
🗣 Podcasts
▶️ Playlists
5 Ideas for Bringing the Music You Love Into Valentine’s Day
What Spotify’s AI Playlists Really Change About Music Discovery
🎧 Streams
🤖 AI
Spotify’s AI Pivot Signals A New Phase For Creator Discovery
Spotify's Top Devs Haven't Coded Since December—AI Does It All
🖌 Design
💻 Tech
From crossfade to lossless: 5 must-tweak Spotify settings most people miss
Spotify Just Killed Thousands of Third-Party Music Apps, and Developers Reveal Which Ones Are Next
📢 Marketing
🎵 New Adventures
Question? Advertising info? Please email Jeff. Have a great day!

Great update, but removing the ‘manual guest tag’ feature has really hurt shows with academic guests who aren’t ‘music artists.’ My recent episodes with Dr. Shamini Jain are missing credits and support tickets are bouncing. Can we get a fix for this? #SpotifyPodcasters” all my tagged guest disappeared- this is not good and considering to move to a more reliable service