Spotify

Spotify has launched its first chart dedicated entirely to music videos. The global top 50 videos are ranked daily by stream count, and are available at the Charts hub and Music Video Playlists hub.

Spotify gave free users the ability to separate out their kids’ listening habits in May, but limited the initial rollout to Argentina, Colombia, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, and Sweden. Now Spotify is expanding the feature to free users in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The first artist partner for Spotify Reserved is Role Model, who is also announcing a tour today. More tours that are part of the program will be announced this week.

Spotify’s bringing its editor commentary from The Drop Weekly to its New Music Friday playlist, so you can hear from the playlist’s curators about why they picked some of their weekly new release highlights. This week they’re spotlighting Olivia Rodrigo, Ayra Starr, ANOTR, Adéla, and Emei.

After updating, the much-maligned sparkle icon — meant to celebrate 20 years of Spotify — will revert back to its former flat self.

The audio streaming platform has reportedly approached concert promoters to obtain licensing rights to show live video of music festivals, and has already starting to add some live event videos, including a show Dua Lipa hosted in Mexico City. Last month, Spotify announced new tools for reserving concert tickets.

After an initial rollout earlier this year, Spotify officially announced on Thursday that the feature is available for “all users globally.” Spotify also says that, for Premium users, downloads for offline listening will also keep going even when the app is closed.

Tap the scissors icon, trim your clip, and then save it to your library, where it can be shared from a dedicated “Your Clips” collection that houses all of your saved clips.

Pixel users can now AI-generate disco ball-style icons for their entire phone. Haters, shield your eyes.

Amazon launched AI-generated audiobooks last year, and now Spotify is launching its own AI audiobook narration feature, Audiobook Creation Tools. Starting in June, self-published authors will be able to use the beta feature to create audio versions of their books using AI voices from ElevenLabs.

This summer, Spotify is launching its Prompted Playlist feature, which it is beta testing for music and podcasts, for audiobooks. The company says audiobooks listening hours on the platform are up 60 percent year over year.

After launching the Verified by Spotify badge for musicians a few weeks ago, the service now has a sticker for podcasters who actually exist in real life, as AI-generated podslop floods RSS feeds.

That means Spotify-hosted shows will be able to be distributed and monetized on Apple Podcasts. In addition, the company is flipping the switch on integration with Libsyn, Podigee, Audioboom, Audiomeans, and Podspace, so users of those services can distribute and monetize their video podcasts on Spotify.

Managed accounts, which offer a music-only experience with parental controls for the under-13 set, were previously reserved for Premium Family subscribers. Now, free users can also create kids accounts, with their own playlists, suggestions, and wrapped experiences. It’s coming to Argentina, Colombia, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, and Sweden first.

Spotify initially acknowledged there were “some issues” with the app at 12:49PM ET and gave the all clear at 4:57PM ET.

Organizing playlists into folders was introduced in 2010, but only available on the desktop app. Now it’s reportedly rolling out to mobile users. Tap the + icon in your library, and you should see a new “folder” option. You can even play an entire folder of playlists, or shuffle them.

The original from 2006 stands out like a sore thumb, but after that, it’s just flattening and tweaks to the font. To celebrate its anniversary, the service is taking a victory lap and talking design. It’s also shared all-time most-streamed lists. No surprises there — it’s Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan.

No more scaled-up mobile interface elements. The latest version of Spotify has a collapsible sidebar and specific portrait and landscape layouts on both iPads and Android tablets. There’s also the ability to browse in one pane, while a video or music keeps playing in the other.

Wuthering Heights being number one makes sense; it just got a blockbuster adaptation. But why is the 8-year-old self-help book from James Clear number two?