Spotify Spreads Its Wings, CapEx Explosions and Distinctions, Q&A on Viral AI Tweets, Anthropic, Giannis
Episode publishedPodcast: Sharp Tech with Ben ThompsonSharp Tech with Ben Thompson
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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?
I'm feeling self satisfied. How so? Well, we just sat down. You you're talking about you have this new external monitor you use for podcasting right in front of you, camera. You're and you're just like, you are so right. And I'm like, yes. I'm I'm you know?
This is what kills me, honestly. I fought you for two and a half years about getting an external monitor, a big, studio display Mac that's sitting here on my desk, and you offered as soon as I took over, Extra Tech Grief took over this podcast, you were like, let me get you a monitor. I said, no, no, no. Don't need it. What I found over the course of hosting this podcast is that the tech guys are usually right in the end, and it really pisses me off time and time again. But here we are. You're coming through in crystal clear resolution, and I love where at.
Right at me because the the the the monitor's behind the camera where it should be. It's it's amazing.
I gotta say though, I feel a little bit inferior as a host because I don't have a cheeky pint to offer you as we record for the next ninety minutes. Not even a pint. You're sitting there in a basement. No on premises pub.
Yeah. And I'm drinking a Diet Coke. So it's probably probably better for breakfast.
The pod here? Call it a day? In any event, we won't do that. We're gonna begin with a company that we discuss only sporadically here on Sharp Tech. They did not make my definitive takeability rankings late last year, but I will read from Bloomberg. They write, shares of Spotify jumped the most in nearly eight years after the Swedish music streaming giant added a record number of users last quarter, far surpassing analyst expectations. The world's biggest streaming service added 38,000,000 new listeners from October through December to reach 751,000,000 according to a statement Tuesday. Paid pr
Oh, I think that's been clear for years. Okay. I mean, Apple Music, there are subscribers. There's YouTube Music. There's other ones. But the big thing is no one it's kinda like iOS versus Android. It feels like people don't necessarily switch a lot. If they have one, they're kind of on it. But no one's going from Spotify to Apple Music. Yeah. Whereas Apple Music users will slowly trickle to Spotify. We have a mutual friend of ours who was at at Apple for a long time would sort of defend Apple Music, and now he's not an Apple. And he's like, actually, has turns out Spotify is a lot better. Yea
But what's the moat? I mean, what's the stickiness for people who use Spotify versus Apple Music?
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