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Shares in Spotify Technology SA (NYSE: SPOT), the worlds largest music streamer, are surging this morning. As of this writing, the Swedish companys stock price is up 18% to above $489 per share after the company reported blowout fourth-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings. Heres what you need to know. Spotifys Q4 2025 surpasses expectations On Tuesday, Spotify reported its Q4 2025 earnings, which outpaced investor expectations. Here are the music streamers most salient metrics for the quarter, which ended on December 31: Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 751 million (up 11% year over year) Premium Subscribers: 290 million (up 10% year over year) Total Revenue: 4.531 billion (up 10% year over year on a constant currency basis) Diluted earnings per share (EPS): 4.43 Whats significant about these numbers is that they not only beat most analyst expectations, but Spotifys own expectations as well. As CNBC notes, LSEG analysts expected Spotify to report an EPS of 2.74. The company easily beat that by 1.69 per share. Spotify was expected to report 4.52 billion in revenue; the company beat slightly with 4.531 in revenue. Analysts also expected Spotify to report around 745 million MAUs. The company beat that by 6 million users. Spotify itself originally forecast 745 million MAUs for the quarter and 289 million premium subscribers, both of which it beat. Spotify Wrapped contributed to premium subscribers beat Premium subscribers are among Spotify’s most valuable, because of the recurring monthly revenue they generate and their loyalty to the brand. And this time, the premium subscriber growth for Q4, which rose 10% year over year, can be partly attributed to the companys wildly popular year-end Wrapped roundup. Speaking on the companys financial call after Spotifys results were announced, co-CEO Alex Norstrom revealed that the companys most recent Wrapped, which went live in December 2025, was also the most successful, calling Wrapped 2025 record-breaking. While we saw impressive engagement back in 2024, we also got feedback on the user experience. So this year, we turned up the dial, and the response was redeeming, Norstrom said, according to a PitchBook transcript of the call. At the end of the campaign, more than 300 million users engaged, which was up 20%, and we saw more than 630 million shares across social media, which is up 42%. He added that “day one of Wrapped marked the highest single day of premium subscriber intake in Spotify history. Given Wrappeds 2025 success, its a safe bet the company will double down on it when the next iteration launches this December. The SPOT stock surge isnt enough to erase its recent decline Despite Spotifys stock price surging in early morning trading today, the impressive gains arent enough to get SPOT out of the broader slump its been in lately. SPOT stock currently sits at around $489 a share after gaining 18% this morning. However, even with todays gains, SPOT shares are still down more than 17% year to date. Spotifys stock price fell dramatically in early February amid a broader tech selloff. Over the past year, SPOT shares also remain in the red, down nearly 25%. At around $489 per share, SPOT shares are currently well below their peak of $785 in June of last year. Looking forward, Spotify says it expects to add another 8 million monthly active users during its current Q1 2026. Likewise, it expects to add another 3 million premium subscribers during the same period. The company expects total revenue for the quarter to be 4.5 billion.
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E-Commerce
As Big Tech races to weave AI into nearly every product, Mozilla is betting some users want the opposite: the ability to turn it off. Last week, the company announced new controls to allow users of its Firefox browser to decide when to use AI. When Firefox 148 debuts later this month, users will be able to manage or disable individual AI features like translations, tab grouping and a sidebar for chatbot like Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Le Chat Mistral. Much of Mozillas vision around AI was outlined in its annual State of Mozilla report, which was released last month and calls for a new Star Wars-style rebel alliance composed of developers, cybersecurity experts, investors, and others focused on responsible tech. The plan involves doing for AI what Mozilla once did in the earlier days of the web. The goal is to bend history in a different direction with the resources and the community we have, says Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman. In a recent interview with Fast Company about the strategy, Surman likened the winner-takes-all mindset of some AI giants and startups to the galactic empire’s ambition to have an expanding footprint. “The Empire, like any empire, is more diffuse and more spread out than you think it is, Surman says. Transforming things is a constant battle of trying to do stuff that’s for humanity, against the things that are threatening us and holding us back. Funding the rebellion With more than 200 million users, Firefox is now Mozillas most popular product. However, Mozillas portfolio also includes other aspects like an email platform, a VPN, an AI data exchange, a venture arm and other initiatives for open-source AI. Mozilla also recently announced a new program inviting technologists to apply for a few months of paid work exploring early-stage ideas that could be worth Mozilla investing in. Part of Mozillas plan includes spending around $650 million this year, with 80% going to improve and maintain core products like Firefox and the rest directed toward what Surman calls systematic and aggressive investments in trustworthy AI and related areas. Mozilla also has $1.4 billion in reserves that it could use as dry powder for worthy bets on things like open-source AI developer tools and encrypted AI assistants. But thats not much compared with the hundreds of billions Mozillas rivals invest in AI-related capital expenditures each year. While Mozilla has leaned on Star Wars rebel alliance metaphor before, its vision has roots in an era that now feels a long time ago (and far, far away). In 1998, when Netscape created Mozilla.org, Microsoft was on trial for antitrust, as early open-source projects began challenging proprietary control of the web. Surman recalls it feeling impossible at the time to unseat a company that dominated browsers, servers, and operating systems. (A few years after AOL bought Netscape, Mozilla was spun off in 2003 as an independent nonprofit, followed in 2005 with the creation of Mozilla Corporation as a for-profit subsidiary.) [It took] a set of people who all wanted a different future they could configure and tweak and make their own, Surman says. It’s not like they all had to build one big thing. We built a browser. A bunch of people built Linux, a bunch of people built web servers, and people built thousands of other things. Decades later, its now Google thats on trial for antitrust while Mozilla competes against other privacy focused browsers like DuckDuckGo and Brave alongside AI startups like OpenAI and Perplexity that now have their own browsers. The antitrust scrutiny and growing distrust of AI and Big Tech have some finding a new hope for raising old questions about choice and competition. Mozilla also operates Gecko, one of only three major browser engines alongside Googles Chromium and Apples WebKit. That gives Mozilla a key role in shaping how open web standards are developed and implemented through groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium. It hasnt all been smooth sailing. Mozilla’s also had setbacks over the past year or two. In late 2024, it announced plans to lay off around 30% of its staff and last year it shuttered products like Pocket as part of a plan to refocus on offerings. Finding moonshots on Earth Mozillas new report is more like a manifesto designed by an underground collective inspired by punk and resistance movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The microsites design seems to intentionally reject the minimalist uniformity common with Big Tech brands and rebrands. Mozillas efforts also include a new Choose Your Future campaign for internet users, developers and advocates interested in charting a new path. The campaign is anchored by a series of five short videos thatll be featured on social media and through ads on platforms like Reddit, Meta, and X. The ads all have different messages, but the same ending sound: a modem dial-up as a nod to the internet from a few decades back. Each features a dystopian parable for an AI era without options but with plenty of AI slop and intrusive chatbots. One video starts with a girl staring at a toy called Funblock, which a radio ad markets as the only block you’ll ever need. No choices, no options, no confusion. Just endless identical fun, the narration says. Funblock may result in boredom, diminished agency, and loss of independent thought. Ask your algorithm if fun is right for you.” Mozillas new AI strategy exists in an uneasy tension of how to build trustworthy tech in an industry obsessed with growth. Can it offer a viable alternative to Big Techs tightly integrated ecosystems while still being the internets moral compass? Surman thinks so, adding that Mozillas having the same AI debates internally as the world is having outside it: what to do with AI, what not to do, when its useful, when its scary, and how to make tech that’s better for everyone. But instead of putting data centers on the moon, Mozilla hopes to forge a future thats privacy-enhanced, open-source, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly. “[People say] ‘You’re crazy, that can’t happen, Surman says. But you think we’re crazier to do a collective barn-raising for something that is joyous and great, and you’re going to put data centers on the moon, and we’re the ones who aren’t grounded in reality?”
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E-Commerce
In 2022, Jennette McCurdy released her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, a brutally honest portrait of her life as a former child star, her battle with eating disorders, and, as the title would suggest, her rather complicated relationship with her mother. The book has spent more than 80 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list with over three million copies sold. It’s currently being adapted into an Apple TV+ series with Jennifer Aniston playing McCurdy’s mom, and McCurdy serving as co-writer, co-executive producer, and co-showrunner. Adjacent to the massive success of I’m Glad My Mom Died has been McCurdy reclaiming writing, not acting, as her true passion. In her memoir, McCurdy stated her acting career was solely to appease her mother and support her family, an experience she’d later describe as “hellish” and “embarrassing.” But writing is McCurdy’s truth “North Star” for her creativity. “Writing has always been in my bones, McCurdy says in the latest episode of Fast Company‘s podcast Creative Control. It’s always been my mode of processing and making sense of the world. And there’s much to process with McCurdy’s debut work of fiction, Half His Age. Half His Age follows Waldo, a 17 year old high school student who enters into an affair with her married English teacher, Mr. Korgy. It’s an unflinching and often visceral exploration of power dynamics, desire, and, most of all, to McCurdy, “female rage.” “That’s what I really tried to explore as thoroughly as I could and as potently as I could,” McCurdy says. “To me, there’s no vessel that’s more potent than a 17-year-old. Feelings are never going to be higher, never gonna be hotter, never gonna be more intense.” In this episode of Creative Control, McCurdy unpacks her writing process (it’s a full-body endeavor, mind you), the discomfort shes intentionally leaning into with Half His Age, and what it means to take full authorshipand creative controlof her career. NOTE: Some spoilers ahead! On her Creative Process The initial idea for Half His Age came to McCurdy nearly a decade ago. She knew she wanted to explore a relationship between a young girl and her teacher, but that was about it. It wasn’t until around two years ago, as she was trying to write something else, that Half His Age kept bubbling up. [Cover Image: Random House] “It was keeping me up at night, frankly. I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” McCurdy says. I said, Im going to give Half His Age a week; I’ll grow tired of it by day three or four; and it will never come to fruition.” Cut to McCurdy going all-in to write her first draft in a month. Im such a full bodied writer. I write with emotions. For my first drafts, my inner critic is nowhere to be found, McCurdy says. That’s generally how I know. If I’m feeling really emotionally activated by an idea, that’s my sign its go timeIm so sorry for saying, its go time. On Making You Uncomfortable The premise alone of Half His Age could be enough to negate a whole swath of potential readers. The concept of a high schooler entering into a sexual relationship with her teacher is most certainly squirm-worthy. Adding to that is the highly visceral nature of how McCurdy explores this affair and the collateral emotional damage it inevitably brings. One scene in particular involves Waldo and Mr. Korgy having sex while she’s on her period. Midway through, they’re interrupted and Waldo is forced to hide in a closet while she continues to have her period holding her blood in her hands. I think it’s a very memorable [scene]. I did want it to feel very visceral and just deeply uncomfortable, McCurdy says. It was important that Waldo experienced something so raw and so ugly because she needed some kind of wake-up call, some kind of rock bottom that could help her piece things together.Broadly speaking, the discomfort in Half His Age is driven by something more universal than cupping your own period blood in a closet. Much of the novel feels like a mediation on gaining autonomy over your own body. At that young age, you don’t know what [your body] wants, McCurdy says. Its just this complicated process of fully integrating your mind and your body.” As a woman, so much of our intuition, so much of my intuition, comes from my body and me sitting with it, she adds. And [thats] for better or worse. Sometimes I’m having feelings that I wish I wasn’t having. But always it’s useful information. And that’s definitely a part of Waldos experience throughout the course of the book and her journey. On Having AuthorityNot ‘Control’ For so much of McCurdys early years, control wasnt part of her vocabulary. In addition to being pushed into an acting career she didnt want, McCurdy recounted stories in her memoir like her mom showering her until she was 18 years old. Fast-forward to today, McCurdy is defining her life and work on her termsalthough she admits to avoiding the word control. I think I have maybe a slightly negative connotation around control. Not completely, but there’s something in it that feels a bit like grippy,” McCurdy says. “I kind of prefer the word authority. So how does she define authority at this stage in her life? When I feel authority, it’s when I allow myself to lead with my body. It’s when I listen to my body, when I take the information that’s it’s giving me, and I sit with it, McCurdy says. For so much of my life, I neglected the cues and the emotions and all that my body was telling me. And now I think, you know what? My body has wisdomthat I don’t got. Listen to this full episode of Creative Control and many more on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher.
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E-Commerce
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