😱 What Is Happening At Spotify?!

📰 The Headlines

• Total US retail sales reached $1.26 trillion in Q3, a 3.2% rise from Q2. (Digital Commerce 360)

• Google shares up 5% after announcement of Gemini AI (CNBC)

• ASOS introduces restrictions on its buy now pay later services to improve profitability. (Retail Week)

• China has overtaken the USA for having the most branded coffee shops. (The Guardian)

• Spanish fashion giant Inditex, who owns Zara, says profit and sales soar in response to it’s Autumn and Winter collections. Sales jumped up by £22 billion (11.1%.) (retail-week)

• Aldi is now the UK’s fourth-largest supermarket, with only Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco above them (Statistica)

• The use of cash has risen for the first time in more than a decade. In the UK, 19% of transactions were made from cash, up from 15% in 2021 (British Retail Consortium)

• Finally, Apple has revealed its most downloaded apps of 2023. The Temu shopping app has come out at number one. (MacRumors)

🤖 Gemini AI - What We Know So Far

The long-awaited rival to ChatGPT is nearly here.

It’s late to the party, but better late than never. Coming out over a year after the release of its biggest rival, it could work both for and against Google.

OpenAI has established ChatGPT very successfully within the market. But Google has had a year of watching, listening and waiting.

What is Gemini?

• Gemini is a high-functioning multimodal model. It can use text, images, audio, and other modes as a source of input.

• It has 3 sizes: Nano, Pro & Ultra.

• The bot has passed 30 out of 32 widely used academic benchmarks for large language models. An improvement on ChatGPT-3.5.

How does Gemini compare to ChatGPT?

At the moment it’s hard to compare the two, as Gemini is not fully rolled out yet. But we’re hearing that Gemini is the more advanced of the two models, but is prone to generating more errors than it’s competitive rival.

Gemini is also intrinsically multimodal by design, being able to understand and formal many types of data. Whereas ChatGPT requires plug-ins to be truly multimodal.

When Will Gemini Be Released?

Gemini was released as an integration through Google’s other chatbot Google Bard on December 6th, 2023. However, we won’t see a full rollout of Gemini until early 2024.

The Outpost’s Opinion: Despite arriving over a year after ChatGPT, and the widespread criticism of Bard, you get the impression that it’s been a bit of a rush for Google to finish Gemini.

…and it’s already got its critics. New information released has shown that the hands-on release video has been heavily edited and isn’t an accurate reflection of Gemini’s real-time ability. Is it true it’s been a rush job to push it out? Quite possibly. Will it be worth it? I hope so.

🧮 Spotify’s Strategic Shift Amid Economic Pressures

Spotify, the renowned streaming giant, is navigating through a transformative period of workforce reductions and leadership changes.

Last week, Spotify announced that it would be laying off 17% of its global workforce, around 1,500 employees.

This hit Spotify shares hard, with CEO Daniel Ek explaining in his letter that a dynamic mix of factors is at play.

Firstly, the company faced slower economic growth. Despite positive earnings reports, Ek highlighted the challenge of increased costs, stating that there was a need to align the gap between operational costs and financial goals.

Secondly, he noted that the company had been more productive but less efficient. Greater resources at the disposal of the business have been beneficial, but the business needs to be both productive and efficient.

To put it bluntly, he described Spotify as resource-rich, with too many people ‘doing work around work instead of contributing to ‘opportunities with real impact’.

A couple of days after the news, it was announced that Spotify CFO Paul Vogel, who was discovered cashing in on $9.3 million in shares a day after the announcement of the layoffs, would be departing his position too.

These changes come after Spotify announced that they had turned a profit in Q3 for the first time in over a year.

This week, both Taylor Swift and The Weeknd surpassed 100 million monthly listeners on the platform, becoming the first female and male artists to do so.

The Outpost’s Opinion: Spotify is not doing badly by any stretch of the imagination. These changes indicate a strategic pivot towards efficiency and financial stability. This move will cause a lot of turbulence in the short term but could be a key decision to make the company leaner and more efficient in the years to come. Will it pay off? Time will tell.