Rebecca Day

Spotify shares closed up 13% Monday at $196.26 after CEO Daniel Ek addressed in a blog post the controversy surrounding podcast host Joe Rogan’s misinformation about COVID-19, which led musician Neil Young to pull his content (see 2201280069). The stock hit a 52-week low last week amid the hubbub. Ek didn’t mention Rogan or Young Sunday, taking a centrist approach: “We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users.” The executive said Spotify has had rules “for many years” about what's acceptable and not on its platform but that it hasn’t been transparent about the policies. It published those rules Sunday. Acknowledging recent “feedback,” Ek said “it’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time.” Experts urged Spotify to act against misinformation Rogan promoted. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus thanked Young for “standing up against misinformation and inaccuracies around #COVID19 vaccination.”

IPhone revenue grew 9% year on year to a record $71.6 billion, CEO Tim Cook told a call on fiscal Q1 ended Dec. 25. Total revenue jumped 11% to $123.9 billion. Services grew 24% to $19.5 billion on strength in Apple Music, Apple TV+, advertising and payments; the App Store had a record December quarter, said Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri. Paid subscriptions totaled 785 million, with 165 million added, he said Thursday. The stock closed 7% higher Friday at $170.33.

Neil Young's Spotify dispute spurred the company's streaming-music rivals to tout their own services. The musician wanted the service to choose between him and podcast host Joe Rogan over the latter's COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. A Spotify-curated Neil Young Radio playlist came up on the service Friday, but Young’s solo recordings weren’t there. The company didn't comment. Apple Music's Twitter account encouraged Young's fans to “listen to his entire catalog” on its service. SiriusXM said it would have an exclusive limited run with "Neil Young Radio." Qobuz emailed that Young's discography is available.

AT&T Fiber pushed speed, reliability and security in a virtual event Monday announcing advanced speeds, new pricing plans for multi-Gbps and initiatives to address the digital divide. It announced new no-contract 2- and 5-Gbps plans for residential and small-business customers.

Netflix customers wanting 4K TV content will now have to pay $19.99 a month, up $2, said the Netflix website Friday. The company raised prices across all tiers, with limits on quality and number of screens that can be viewed simultaneously. The basic plan is $9.99 for one standard-definition screen and one mobile device for downloads. The standard plan, raised $1.50 to $15.49, allows viewing of two screens at once and two mobile devices for downloads. The $19.99 premium plan has a four-screen maximum for simultaneous viewing and four mobile download devices. HD content is available on the top two tiers, with Ultra HD only on Premium, it said. All three plans have unlimited movies, TV shows and games, viewable on a laptop, TV, phone or tablet. Prices apply to new members and will gradually take effect for all current members, Netflix said. Current members will receive an email notification 30 days before their price changes, unless they switch plans, said the company. Netflix didn’t respond to questions. Twitter users questioned the quality levels.

Podcast usage is rising for "diverse" audiences, Nielsen emailed Thursday. Mainstream media often centers on one perspective or experience, “with representation often addressed as a complement to a main story or primary character,” but podcasts increasingly resonate with diverse audiences, it said. The average number of times each identity group listens to a podcast varies from nine to 12 per month, Nielsen said, counting Asian Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ consumers. People with disabilities listen to podcasts most at home (67%); Asian Americans listen the least at home at 43%. Black listeners stream audio more than other audiences, “while listening more closely when brands reach out,” averaging 73% brand recall for podcasts ads, it said. Podcast listening among Hispanics 25-39 has doubled in the past three years, it said, and Asian Americans have upped their podcast listening five times over the past decade, with news among the leading topics, it said. The Interactive Advertising Bureau predicts podcast ad revenue will hit $2 billion by 2023 vs. $842 million in 2020, Nielsen noted. Host-read ads drive a brand recall rate of 71%, creating “high levels of consumer interest, purchase intent and recommendation intent,” it said. Diverse audiences want to hear from “trusted voices with similar backgrounds or that have similar interests,” Nielsen said; topics need to be inclusive and relevant from credible sources with original voices.

Advertising-supported and transactional VOD models are growing as a way for over-the-top video providers to differentiate in an “incredibly crowded” streaming market, said Parks Associates analyst Jennifer Kent, opening the company’s online event Tuesday. Kent referenced “hundreds” of streaming video services in the U.S., with all types of business models benefiting from a “massive increase” in OTT adoption spawned by stay-at-home COVID-19 trends. SVOD leads by far, but AVOD and TVOD services have increased users; 44% of OTT customers say they used AVOD in the past 30 days, up from 28% in 2018. One in five report using TVOD, double 2018. Hybrid models using subscription, ad-based and transactional models are emerging as a way to add users and content libraries while monetizing the business, Kent noted. SVOD and pay TV remain the first service type consumers turn to when looking for content, with ad-based offerings supplementing that, she said. That could change as ad-supported services expand their interfaces to resemble a content hub, she said, citing The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus.

An Amazon Web Services outage midday Tuesday took out a swath of gaming logins, streaming video services and cloud-based events, including the Vizio investor presentation at a virtual UBS technology conference. Amazon reported “impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The outage affected some of Amazon’s monitoring and incident response tooling, “which is delaying our ability to provide updates,” said Amazon, saying it “identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.” The Verge reported outages for Disney+ streaming and games and some problems accessing Amazon.com, the Alexa voice assistant, Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music and Ring security cameras. “There are reports from network admins everywhere about errors connecting to Amazon’s instances and the AWS Management Console that controls their access to the servers,” said the Verge. The webpage for Vizio’s event said the presentation was being recorded and the replay “will be posted as soon as the AWS Network is back up.”

When Apple and Amazon wrapped hi-resolution music into standard music subscription packages in the spring, a fifth of all music streaming subscribers had access to high-quality music, Futuresource reported. Though the music services helped enable a “mass-market migration” toward hi-res audio, challenges are blocking widespread adoption, said Futuresource's Simon Forrest. The playback side hasn’t caught up, said the report: In 2022, devices will catch up with the capabilities of music streaming services. Forrest called super resolution a “potential, but unconfirmed, opportunity for the audio industry to use AI-based computation.” It would let spatial and higher resolution audio formats be synthesized on devices, similar to how HD video content can be upscaled, the analyst emailed us Monday.

The digital component of CES will extend beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, said Jean Foster, CTA senior vice president-marketing and communications, at CES Unveiled New York. “When you actually allow people to join digitally, we can reach many, many more people, so that will be an ongoing part of the show" (see 2110260044). The pandemic forced the trade show industry to “try something different; we had to,” said CES Executive Vice President Karen Chupka Wednesday: But the value of a trade show remains “serendipity -- walking the halls and seeing new companies.” Some 1,600 companies “and counting” are exhibiting, she said. Though that’s fewer than the 4,400 at CES 2020, 1,600 is "a lot of companies to sift through on a digital platform,” she said. All CES attendees must show proof of vaccination. CTA President Gary Shapiro and Chupka said they weren’t aware of any invited keynoters who declined to participate in CES due to the vaccine requirement. A few tech executives opted out due to the vaccine requirement “because they had medical reasons,” Shapiro said. See FAQs.