Tech
Spotify’s AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want
Spotify was a music app at one time. Then it added podcasts. Then audiobooks. Now the company is piling AI features into its app at a pace that can feel overwhelming. The latest wave, announced at its investor day, skews heavily toward using AI to generate content rather than using AI to help users find content they actually want.
Until now, Spotify has been largely a platform for human-created content — music, podcasts, and audiobooks. As it adds AI-powered tools to generate all of those formats, the app is poised to look very different. That shift is also creating friction — AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage it.
Last year, the company was criticized for not properly labeling AI music. Following that backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard — a widely used labeling system for identifying AI-generated tracks — for its catalog. Now Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that allows fans to create AI covers and remixes of existing songs. While this agreement ensures artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform and could make it harder for listeners to discover emerging human artists.
Spotify is also partnering with the AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that lets authors narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, AI narration can still sound unnatural at times.
Stranger still is the company’s productivity push: The personal podcasts feature lets users generate AI-made podcasts about anything, including summaries of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company introduced a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to build personal podcasts through prompts directly in the app.
The company is also releasing an experimental desktop app that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls in relevant information, and generates a personalized audio briefing. It’s the kind of feature that could have lived inside the existing Spotify app — which makes the choice to spin it into a separate product worth watching.
“With your permission, it can take action on your behalf: researching topics, using a web browser, organizing information, and helping complete tasks,” the app’s description reads. The language is a tell: Spotify is gesturing toward agentic AI — software that doesn’t just answer questions but autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t elaborate further, but given its ambition to own all things audio, it’s not hard to imagine something like AI meeting notes, in the style of Granola, eventually making its way into Spotify.
All of this adds up to more content on the platform, and Spotify’s answer to helping users navigate it is, again, AI. The company is adding natural-language discovery for audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google has been pushing people toward conversational search. The groundwork is already there: Spotify already has an AI DJ that lets you chat while listening to music.
Now users can ask questions to get answers about a particular podcast episode or its themes more broadly. They might already be doing this in chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Spotify doesn’t want them to leave the app.
Spotify is trying hard to become an everything-audio app, but in that quest, it is filling itself with features users didn’t ask for and making it confusing and harder to navigate.
The company is no longer focused solely on consumption — it’s actively nudging users to create content, too, even if it’s just for themselves. The risk is that this trades depth for breadth: The more time users spend making sense of a cluttered app, the less time they spend discovering and listening to content by other creators. This raises the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive moat or diluting what made it essential? If users feel that the app has lost focus and isn’t surfacing the content they want, more of them may follow my colleague Amanda out the door — and take their listening time with them.
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Tech
Smart ring maker Oura files to go public
SpaceX may have stolen the show with its IPO prospectus, but Elon Musk’s aerospace-AI-data center company wasn’t the only notable business to file to go public this week. On Thursday, Finnish smart ring company Oura said that it had confidentially submitted a Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for an IPO.
Founded in 2015, Oura has emerged as one of the most popular wearable health trackers, setting itself apart from Fitbit, Garmin, and Apple’s watch products with a sleek, unobtrusive ring.
The Oura ring tracks activity, sleep, and daily “readiness,” among other health metrics, and today has customers around the world. At the time of its Series E last September, Oura said it had sold 5.5 million rings to date, a steep jump from the 2.5 million figure it had reported the prior year.
That Series E saw Oura raising $875 million at a valuation of $11 billion, more than double the $5 billion price tag it had earned in a prior round in 2024.
The company recently introduced a proprietary AI model geared toward women’s health in an effort to cater to its growing base of women customers.
Tech
Meta quietly launches a new Reddit-like app called Forum
Meta has quietly released a new stand-alone app for Facebook Groups called “Forum.” The company seems to be positioning Forum as a platform that functions similarly to Reddit, describing the app as a “dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and communities you care about.”
The app appears to have first been spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra.
After you sign in with your Facebook account, Forum will load in your groups, profile, and activity, and let you make posts with a nickname, just like on the standard Facebook app. Meta noted that your groups still exist on Facebook, and anything you share on Forum will be visible in your groups on Facebook.
Meta says Forum’s feeds are centered on conversations within groups, allowing users to see “what real people are saying, not just what’s trending,” and making it easy to pick up where they left off.
The app includes an AI-powered “Ask” tab that lets users ask questions and receive answers compiled from discussions across different groups. There’s also an admin AI assistant to help administrators manage groups and moderate content.
This isn’t the first time Meta has launched a stand-alone app for groups. Back in 2014, the company rolled out a dedicated Groups app that aimed to make it easier for users to share content across groups, but that effort was shuttered in 2017.
Forum is one of two new apps from Meta in recent weeks. Last month, the social media company rolled out a new app called Instants that lets users share disappearing photos with Instagram friends.
Instants and Forum come amid a broader effort at Meta to release more apps. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that with AI-driven efficiencies allowing the company to build more apps, the social media giant now aims to roll out many more apps than it has historically.
Referring to Meta’s chief product office Chris Cox, Zuckerberg reportedly said, “So Chris and I have been talking about ‘all right, well can we build 50 new apps?’ Like, yeah probably. But we probably should start by doing a few before we just, like, ramp up trying to do 50 all at once.”
Meta might think consumers want more apps, but that’s likely not the case, especially when its new apps mostly end up being copies of other popular services. Instants, for example, borrows ideas from BeReal and Snapchat, while Meta Edits, launched last year, is largely a copy of ByteDance’s CapCut.
Meta did not immediately return a request for comment.
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Tech
SpaceX files to go public, and the math requires a little faith
The SpaceX S-1 is finally here, and the story it tells goes way further than rockets. The filing runs to 36 pages of risk factors alone, and the numbers inside match the ambition: a $28 trillion total addressable market, a pay package tied to establishing a Mars colony, and a valuation target that would make it the largest IPO in American history.
Watch as Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what the filing actually says, what it leaves out, and whether any of this math connects to reality. The team also covers NanoCo turning down a $20M buyout to raise a $12M seed for its secure Nano Claw alternative, Anthropic’s $300M acquisition of SDK startup Stainless, and the Google I/O announcement that promises to change search as we know it.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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