How Spotify AI plans to know what’s going on inside your head, and find the right track for it

Published

1 year ago

April 14, 2024

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With about 100 million tracks available and over 600 million subscribers, helping listeners find the music they will love has become a navigational challenge for Spotify. It’s the promise of personalization and meaningful recommendations that will give the vast catalog more meaning, and that is central to Spotify’s mission.

The streaming audio giant’s suite of recommendation tools has grown over the years: Spotify Home feed, Discover Weekly , Blend, Daylist, and Made for You Mixes. And in recent years, there have been signs that it is working. According to data released by Spotify at its 2022 Investor Day, artist discoveries every month on Spotify had reached 22 billion, up from 10 billion in 2018, “and we’re nowhere near done,” the company stated at that time.

Over the past decade or more, Spotify has been investing in AI and, in particular, in machine learning. Its recently launched AI DJ may be its biggest bet yet that technology will allow subscribers to better personalize listening sessions and discover new music. The AI DJ mimics the vibe of radio by announcing the names of songs and lead-in to tracks, something aimed in part to help ease listeners into extending out of their comfort zones. An existing pain point for AI algorithms — which can be excellent at giving listeners what it knows they already like — is anticipating when you want to break out of that comfort zone.

The AI DJ combines personalization technology, generative AI, and a dynamic AI voice, and listeners can tap the DJ button when they want to hear something new, and something less-directly-derived from their established likes. Behind the dulcet tones of an AI DJ there are people, tech experts and music experts, who aim to improve the recommendation capacity of Spotify’s tools. The company has hundreds of music editors and experts across the globe. A Spotify spokesperson said the generative AI tool allows the human experts to “scale their innate knowledge in ways never before possible.”

The data on a particular song or artist captures a few attributes: particular musical features, and which song or artist it has been typically paired with among the millions of listening sessions whose data the AI algorithm can access. Gathering information about the song is a fairly easy process, including release year, genre, and mood — from happy to danceable or melancholic. Various musical attributes, such as tempo, key, and instrumentation, are also identified. Combining this data associated with millions of listening sessions and other users’ preferences helps to generate new recommendations, and makes the leap possible from aggregated data to individual listener assumptions.

In its simplest formulation, “Users who liked Y also liked Z. We know you like Y, so you might like Z,” is how an AI finds matches. And Spotify says it’s working. “Since launching DJ, we’ve found that when DJ listeners hear commentary alongside personal music recommendations, they’re more willing to try something new (or listen to a song they may have otherwise skipped),” the spokesperson said.

If successful, it’s not just listeners that get relief from a pain point. A great discovery tool is as beneficial to the artists seeking to build connections with new fans.

Julie Knibbe, founder & CEO of Music Tomorrow — which aims to help artists connect with more listeners by understanding how algorithms work and how to better work with them — says everyone is trying to figure out how to balance familiarity and novelty in a meaningful way, and everyone is leaning on AI algorithms to help make this possible. Be she says the balance between discovering new music and staying with established patterns is a central unresolved issue for all involved, from Spotify to listeners and the artists.

“Any AI is only good at what you tell them to do,” Knibbe said. “These recommender systems have been around for over a decade and they’ve become very good at predicting what you will like. What they can’t do is know what’s in your head, specifically when you want to venture out into a new musical terrain or category.”

Spotify’s Daylist is an attempt to use generative AI to take into account established tastes, but also the varying contexts that can shape and reshape a listeners’ tastes across the course of a day, and make new recommendations that fit various moods, activities and vibes. Knibbe says it’s possible that improvements like these continue, and the AI gets better at finding the formula for how much novelty a listener wants, but she added, “the assumption that people want to discover new music all the time is not true.”

Most people still return, fairly happily, to familiar musical terrain and listening patterns.

“You have various profiles of listeners, curators, experts … people put different demands on the AI,” Knibbe said. “Experts are more difficult to surprise, but they aren’t the majority of listeners, who tend to be more casual,” and whose Spotify usage, she says, often amounts to creating a “comfortable background” to daily life.

Technology optimists often speak in terms of an era of “abundance.” With 100 million songs available, but many listeners preferring the same 100 songs a million times, it’s easy to understand why a new balance is being sought. But Ben Ratliff, a music critic and author of “Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty,” says algorithms are less solution to this problem than a further entrenching of it.

“Spotify is good at catching onto popular sensibilities and creating a soundtrack for them,” Ratliff said. “Its Sadgirl Starter Pack playlist, for instance, has a great name and about a million and a half likes. Unfortunately, under the banner of a gift, the SSP simplifies the oceanic complexity of young-adult depression into a small collection of dependably ‘yearny’ music acts, and makes hard clichés of music and sensibility form more quickly.”

Works of curation that are clearly made by actual people with actual preferences remain Ratliff’s preference. Even a good playlist, he says, might have been made without much intention and conscience, but just a developed sense of pattern recognition, “whether it’s patterns of obscurity or patterns of the broadly known,” he said.

Depending on the individual, AI may have equal chances of becoming either a utopian or dystopian solution within the 100-million track universe. Ratliff says most users should keep it more simple in their streaming music journeys. “As long as you realize that the app will never know you in the way you want to be known, and as long as you know what you’re looking for, or have some good prompts at the ready, you can find lots of great music on Spotify.”

Technology

Anthropic raises $13 billion funding round at $183 billion valuation

Published

2 hours ago

September 2, 2025

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Anthropic raises billion funding round at 3 billion valuation

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Anthropic on Tuesday announced it has closed a $13 billion funding round at a $183 billion post-money valuation, roughly triple what the artificial intelligence startup was worth as of its last raise in March.

The most recent funding round was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors including Altimeter, General Catalyst and Coatue also participated, Anthropic said.

“This financing demonstrates investors’ extraordinary confidence in our financial performance and the strength of their collaboration with us to continue fueling our unprecedented growth,” Anthropic finance chief Krishna Rao said in a statement.

Anthropic’s valuation has been on a steep climb since it announced its AI assistant Claude in March 2023. The Amazon-backed startup was founded by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO Dario Amodei.

OpenAI and Anthropic are fierce competitors in the AI market. OpenAI, which rocketed into the mainstream following the release of its AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, is preparing to sell stock as part of a secondary sale that would value the company at roughly $500 billion, as CNBC reported in August.

As of August, Anthropic said its run-rate revenue has reached over $5 billion, up from roughly $1 billion at the beginning of the year. Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers, the company said.

Anthropic said it will use its fresh capital to deepen safety research, meet growing enterprise demand and support international expansion.

WATCH: As Anthropic goes, so goes the generative AI trade, says Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz

Technology

Amazon cracks down on Prime free shipping sharing

Published

2 hours ago

September 2, 2025

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Amazon cracks down on Prime free shipping sharing

A worker prepares orders at an Amazon fulfillment center.

Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon is eliminating a program that allows members of its Prime subscription program to share free shipping benefits with people outside their household.

The company began notifying users in recent days that it plans to end the Prime Invitee Program on Oct. 1, according to a notice viewed by CNBC.

“We are writing to inform you that the Prime Invitee Program, which allowed sharing Prime’s fast, free delivery with others, will end on October 1, 2025,” the notice states. “Your invited guests will be notified directly about this change by September 5, 2025.”

Amazon previously let Prime members share free, two-day shipping with one other adult in their household, even if they used a different address.

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Technology

Salesforce is having a bad year. This is where investors want to see growth

Published

3 hours ago

September 2, 2025

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Salesforce is having a bad year. This is where investors want to see growth

Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, attends the 50th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2020.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

There was a moment, during the pandemic-fueled growth days of 2020, when Salesforce surpassed Oracle by market cap. Marc Benioff had finally toppled his protege, Larry Ellison.

That moment is long gone.

Salesforce’s stock price has dropped 25% this year, the worst performance in large-cap tech and the second-steepest decline in the Dow, beating only UnitedHealth. Meanwhile, Oracle has jumped 34%, outperforming most of its peers and well outpacing the major indexes.

The two companies that were once about even by valuation are now separated by about $400 billion. Oracle is worth $630 billion, and Salesforce has dropped to $239 billion. Ellison now ranks second behind Elon Musk on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a $278 billion net worth. Benioff sits in 318th place at $10.4 billion.

Investors are eager to hear how Benioff plans to right the ship when Salesforce reports quarterly results after the close on Wednesday.

Sales growth has been mired in the single digits for four straight quarters as the company reckons with the challenges of saturation in its key market of customer relationship management software. That streak is expected to continue, with analysts estimating revenue growth of 8.7% to $10.1 billion, according to LSEG.

During the April period, about a quarter of Salesforce’s $9.3 billion in subscription and support revenue came from products related to customer service, its biggest category. The company charges for its Service Cloud offering based on the number of agents who use the software.

With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, some analysts predict more inquiries will be handled through automation, posing a risk to Salesforce.

Benioff is well aware of the challenge. He said in June that AI is already handling about 30% to 50% of the company’s work. It’s a big reason why Salesforce reportedly slashed 1,000 jobs earlier this year.

When it comes to customers, Salesforce now sells Agentforce, an AI system for answering customer support requests. After becoming available in October, Agentforce was delivering $100 million in annualized revenue, Benioff told analysts on a conference call in May.

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“It’s not significant enough to move the needle on this business, given the scale,” said Michael Turrin, a Wells Fargo analyst who has a hold recommendation on Salesforce shares.

The hope is that customers end up paying more for Agentforce than for Service Cloud, Turrin said.

The big difference for Oracle is that it’s one of the early beneficiaries of the AI boom. Known primarily for its database software that sits inside big companies and government agencies, Oracle has notched cloud infrastructure commitments from OpenAI and Musk’s xAI.

Agentforce could be Salesforce’s window into AI business, if it gains traction.

“I think there’s been a lot of frustration with Salesforce’s share performance, so I think we’re at a point where investors are trying to figure out if there’s an opportunity for a bit of a rebound here,” Turrin said.

Looking for double-digit growth

Investors also want to see improvement in current remaining performance obligations at constant currency, a measure of expected revenue over the next year. In May, operating chief Robin Washington said she was expecting that number to be 9% for the August quarter.

“The longer that metric stays above 10%, the more confident investors are that this business can sustain a 10% growth profile for at least the next year,” Turrin said.

Analysts expect revenue growth to pick up very slightly in the fiscal third quarter, with consensus estimates currently at 9%, according to LSEG.

Salesforce declined to comment.

Expansion could come from outside. In May, Salesforce agreed to buy data management company Informatica for $8 billion. That’s by far the largest deal for Salesforce since the $27.1 billion purchase of Slack in 2021. In the interim, Salesforce hadn’t spent more than $2.5 billion on M&A, which has been a major growth driver in years past.

Demmert: We think this might be the quarter

In late 2022, activist investors started going after Salesforce, dissatisfied with Benioff’s high-cost acquisitions, the company’s underperforming stock and its expanding workforce. The activists began agitating for a more favorable mix of sales and profit, and Salesforce responded by expanding margins sooner than it had planned.

One of the main instigators, Starboard Value, is back for more. In the second quarter, the firm, which first bought Salesforce stock in 2022, boosted its holding by 47%, according to a filing. In October 2024, Starboard’s Jeff Smith complimented Salesforce’s profitability improvements but said he still believed “there’s a lot more to go.”

Vulcan Value Partners is a Salesforce shareholder that’s comfortable with the software company’s plans. After picking up a stake in 2020, Vulcan added 345,000 shares in the second quarter, increasing its total holdings to $300 million.

“The thing that we focus on is the value per share of the business,” said Stephen Simmons, a portfolio manager at the firm. “That is continuing to grow. There’s nothing we’re seeing that’s saying this company is going away anytime soon.”

Analysts expect earnings per share to increase to $2.78 for the latest quarter, up from $2.56 a year earlier, according to LSEG.

Vulcan sold its Oracle shares in 2020, missing out on a steep rally that followed. Simmons said he’d buy again if the stock becomes discounted.

“Funny how things go around and come around,” Simmons said. “Benioff starts Salesforce as a cloud-native enterprise company, and Larry’s over at Oracle trying to transition his on-prem customers to the cloud.”

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