Spotify on Tuesday reported strong third-quarter results that topped Wall Street expectations and saw total revenue climb 12% year over year, but issued weak guidance for revenue and subscribers for the current quarter.
Shares of Spotify fell 2% on Tuesday.
Here’s what Spotify reported compared with LSEG estimates:
Earnings per share: 3.28 euros vs. 1.97 euros expected.
Revenue: 4.27 billion euros vs. 4.23 billion euros expected.
The streaming platform increased premium subscribers by 12% to 281 million, coming in just below StreetAccount expectations of 281.24 million.
Spotify hiked subscription prices in August to 11.99 euros from 10.99 euros in multiple markets, including South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.
Premium revenue for Q3 grew 9%, or 13% on a constant currency basis, but 446 million euros in ad-supported revenue was down 6% from last year, which was flat on a constant currency basis.
StreetAccount expected 467.7 million euros in ad-supported revenue for the quarter.
“The business is healthy,” CEO Daniel Ek said in a release. “We’re shipping faster than ever. And we have the tools we need – pricing, product innovation, operational leverage, and eventually the ads turnaround – to deliver both revenue growth and profit expansion.”
Spotify announced in September that Ek will step down at the beginning of January and transition to the position of executive chairman. Longtime executives and co-presidents Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström are set to replace him.
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The Swedish company forecasted fourth-quarter revenue of 4.5 billion euros, below the StreetAccount expectation of 4.56 billion euros. The streamer expects total premium subcribers to reach 289 million in the fourth quarter, short of the StreetAccount expectation for 291.1 million.
The streaming giant expects fourth-quarter operating income of 620 million euros and MAU of 745 million. Both were ahead of StreetAccount expectations of 610.2 million euros and 739.5 million MAU.
The company’s total monthly active users for the third quarter rose 11% to 713 million from the same period last year, surpassing its prior guidance and LSEG analysts’ expectations of 710 million.
Spotify attributed the growth to multiple enhancements in its mobile free tier added in September, including the ability to pick, play, and share any song. Free users previously had to listen to shuffled playlists with limited skips.
The company is also leaning into artificial intelligence, launching the service on ChatGPT in October. Users are now able to receive personalized music and podcast recommendations from the chatbot based on written prompts.
Later that month, Spotify also announced that it would partner with Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and other music agencies to develop AI products.
The company received backlash in June after Ek led a 600-million-euro funding round for defense technology startup Helsing, leading many musicians to remove their catalogs in protest.
Neptune and OpenAI have collaborated on a metrics dashboard to help teams that are building foundation models. The companies will work “even more closely together” because of the acquisition, Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź said in a blog.
The startup will wind down its external services in the coming months, Niedźwiedź said. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows,” OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a statement. “We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn.”
OpenAI has acquired several companies this year.
It purchased a small interface startup called Software Applications Incorporated for an undisclosed sum in October, product development startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in September and Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion in May.
Neptune had raised more than $18 million in funding from investors including Almaz Capital and TDJ Pitango Ventures, according to its website. Neptune’s deal with OpenAI is still subject to customary closing conditions.
“I am truly grateful to our customers, investors, co-founders, and colleagues who have made this journey possible,” Niedźwiedź said. “It was the ride of a lifetime already, yet still I believe this is only the beginning.”
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron said on Wednesday that it plans to stop selling memory to consumers to focus on meeting demand for high-powered artificial intelligence chips.
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”
Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is creating shortages for inputs like memory as a handful of companies commit to spend hundreds of billions in the next few years to build massive data centers. Memory, which is used by computers to store data for short periods of time, is facing a global shortage.
Micron shares are up about 175% this year, though they slipped 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.
AI chips, like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AdvancedMicro Devices, use large amounts of the most advanced memory. For example, the current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192GB of memory per graphics processor. Google’s latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, needs 192GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Memory is also used in phones and computers, but with lower specs, and much lower quantities — many laptops only come with 16GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that tinkerers could use to build their own PCs or upgrade their laptops. Crucial also sold solid-state hard drives.
Micron competes against SK Hynix and Samsung in the market for high-bandwidth memory, but it’s the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts have said that SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary memory supplier.
Micron supplies AMD, which says its AI chips use more memory than others, providing them a performance advantage for running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, comes with 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Micron’s Crucial business was not broken out in company earnings. However, its cloud memory business unit showed 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.
Analysts at Goldman on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron’s stock to $205 from $180, though they maintained their hold recommendation. The analysts wrote in a note to clients that due to “continued pricing momentum” in memory, they “expect healthy upside to Street estimates” when Micron reports quarterly results in two weeks.
A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on whether the move would result in layoffs.
“Micron intends to reduce impact on team members due to this business decision through redeployment opportunities into existing open positions within the company,” the company said in its release.
Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.
The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.
The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.
AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.
Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.
In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.
In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.
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“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.
The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.
But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.
The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.