AI-driven efficiencies boosted profits, but maintaining growth may require more than automation and personalization to keep users engaged and willing to pay more.

Spotify reports its first full year of profitability: Cost-cutting, price hikes, and a UMG deal should help the company build on its strong Q4 in 2025.

How SiriusXM plans to compete with Spotify: After a failed music streaming venture, the company is reinvesting in its car business.

Spotify and UMG expand their partnership: Companies offer new subscription tiers, premium content bundles, and artist-first royalty reforms.

A series of major milestones are on tap for total media and digital media ad spending around the world in 2025, although growth will be uneven across countries and regions.

Amid leadership upheaval and falling stock, it could be an attractive target for Amazon or Spotify, which could benefit from Sonos’ hardware expertise.

After more than a decade of healthy, double-digit compound annual growth, ad spending on digital audio services slowed dramatically in 2023, downshifting the space into a new era

Ad budgets are slowly migrating from terrestrial radio to digital platforms, but the shift is stymied by slow platform subscriber growth and by YouTube.

The year of AI: Artificial intelligence invaded all aspects of life in 2024, from work to play and generation to generation. New genAI players appeared to take on megaliths like Google and Meta. It would be a copout to say that 2025 will bring more of the same, but we expect startups to begin taking more market share from Big Tech and challenging the status quo.

In January, our EMARKETER Daily newsletter team made some advertising and marketing predictions for 2024 on everything from AI to attention metrics.

Wrapped 2024 feels more like a beta test than a celebration, hinting at a company spread too thin to please its audience.

SiriusXM struggles to pull off streaming: A low revenue forecast prompts the company to reexamine its strengths in a crowded field.

AI’s role in Spotify Wrapped is slightly subdued: The platform’s yearly marketing event included AI, but stopped short of prominently featuring it.

Spotify has nearly twice as many US listeners as the next most popular digital audio platform, Amazon Music, at 103.6 million compared to 53.1 million, per our September 2024 forecast.

With features like video and synced illustrations, Spotify seeks to rebrand as more than audio-only and tap into the growing audiobook market.

On today’s podcast episode, we discuss what happened to Spotify’s subscriber growth after it raised prices, how it plans to take on YouTube, and what has led to the audio giant inching closer to profitability. Tune in to the discussion with Senior Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson and Analyst Daniel Konstantinovic.

The 2024 general election has been dubbed “the podcast election” due to candidates’ potentially game-changing appearances on some of the biggest podcasts in the US. These appearances illustrate the untapped potential of podcast advertising. “Podcasts may have played a big role in the US election, but they're still getting overlooked by advertisers,” wrote EMARKETER senior vice president of content and executive editor Vladimir Hanzlik on LinkedIn.

High audio listenership and time spent this year means limited growth. Subscription revenues will be healthy, as most listeners pay to limit ads. And Spotify will lead in nearly every metric, though several platforms are doing well.

New revenue-sharing perks could attract more visual content and position the platform to compete with YouTube as video podcasts surge in popularity.

How time spent with media, device ownership, and media adoption stack up in Central and Eastern Europe.