Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

This Taste Profile is key to Spotify’s recommendations, including personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Made For You recommendations, and the year-end review known as Spotify Wrapped, among other things. 

Starting with Premium listeners initially in New Zealand, Spotify will allow users to see all their listening data in one place in the app, including music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Users will then be able to edit this profile and even fine-tune future recommendations by asking for more or less of a certain vibe. After doing so, the app’s home page will reflect a different set of suggestions.

404 Media (paywalled) is reporting on how Spotify is allowing AI-Generated songs on various dead artists’ pages:

According to his official Spotify page, Blaze Foley, a country music singer-songwriter who was murdered in 1989, released a new song called “Together” last week. The song, which features a male country singer, piano, and an electric guitar, vaguely sounds like a new, slow country song. The Spotify page for the song also features an image of an AI-generated image of a man who looks nothing like Foley singing into a microphone.  

Craig McDonald, the owner of Lost Art Records, the label that distributes all of Foley’s music and manages his Spotify page, told me that any Foley fan would instantly realize “Together” is not one of his songs. 

Consequence has more:

Update: In a statement a spokesperson for Spotify said, “The content in question violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner. This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify.”

TechCrunch:

The billionaire, who primarily lives in Stockholm, just led a €600 million investment in Helsing, a 4-year-old, Munich-based defense tech company that is now valued at €12 billion, as first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed separately by TechCrunch. The deal makes it one of Europe’s most valuable privately held companies; it also highlights Europe’s scramble to build its own military muscle as the world grows messier and the U.S. turns inward. […] But what started as an AI software company has grown much more ambitious. Helsing is now building its own strike drones and aircraft and said it’s working on a fleet of unmanned mini submarines in order to improve naval surveillance.

Bloomberg:

Spotify Technology SA shares tumbled on Tuesday after the streaming company gave a muted outlook for profit and subscriber growth in the current quarter. 

The Stockholm-based company forecast gross profit margins of 31.5% in the second quarter, missing analysts’ average estimate for 31.6% according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Spotify sees monthly active users rising to 689 million, less than the 694.4 million analysts expected.