Spotify could break away from Google and Apple’s payment duopoly: Google’s alternative payments pilot program might only serve higher-profile apps, leaving smaller developers in the lurch.

Spotify has the most users among digital audio platforms, followed by Pandora, Amazon Music, and Apple Music. Amazon will surpass Pandora in listeners next year.

Spotify earnings: Following some rocky times due to the pandemic, we expect Spotify to see strong advertising and user growth in Q2, plus an update on its podcast ventures.

eMarketer principal analyst Mark Dolliver, junior analyst Blake Droesch and forecasting analyst Peter Vahle at Insider Intelligence discuss Joe Rogan moving exclusively to Spotify, sports trickling back, Twitter letting users limit who replies to them, TikTok AR ads, a grandmother who violated GDPR, an entire indoor town and more.

Time spent with digital audio has increased thanks to the emergence of streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stingray, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and Radioplayer Canada, which have expanded the digital listening menu. YouTube is also a go-to platform for podcasts.

But customer service representatives will still be necessary for more complex issues and to interact with users who prefer talking to people. Spotify also directs users to informational articles. In addition to the bot, Spotify also built an AI model to help classify issues, a task once considered infeasible due to the sheer quantity of them.

In a Forrester poll conducted in February 2022, 18.9% of Spotify users reported they would cancel their subscription following a dustup involving Joe Rogan, a popular podcaster with an exclusive deal with Spotify.

The pandemic led to many upward revisions of our UK digital user forecasts. Some changes (podcast listeners) will be permanent, while others will be temporary (digital gamers). Our social network user numbers, meanwhile, didn’t change much at all.

Ikea started with Spotify and focused less on commercial offers. Creative utilized 11 different ad units delivered against user triggers, including Audio Everywhere spots (Spotify’s staple format), video for users actively using the app, static overlays like homepage takeovers, and sponsored playlists.

Spotify’s video podcasting push could bring in more users and marketers: Podcasts are already gaining steam with both groups, and video will help make the medium—and ads in it—even more engaging.