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At a Fast Company panel moderated by senior editor Liz Stinson, product and design leaders from Brooks Running, Block and Spotify discussed how artificial intelligence is reshaping the process of building products consumers want. The conversation centered on balancing faster AI-assisted workflows with genuine consumer appeal amid growing market competition.
Apple Music and Spotify both include adjustable audio quality and equalizer settings that can noticeably improve sound on an iPhone. Users can raise streaming quality tiers in each app's settings menu, then fine-tune sound using built-in EQ presets or custom sliders. Volume normalization features like Apple's Sound Check and Spotify's Volume normalization can also be toggled to balance loudness across tracks.
Spotify has rolled out a new settings toggle that lets listeners exclude children's and family music streams from shaping their taste profile. The change affects personalized features like Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, and Wrapped, and it applies retroactively so past listens of kids' content won't skew a user's top songs or artists.
Spotify has introduced a new setting that lets users prevent music played for children from influencing their personalized recommendations and year-end Wrapped summary. The toggle allows adults sharing an account with kids to isolate nursery rhymes and children's music from skewing their listening data.
Spotify introduced a new settings option letting users exclude kids and family music, such as nursery rhymes or movie soundtracks, from shaping their Discovery Weekly, Daily Mix and Wrapped. The toggle works retroactively, so previously played kids' tracks can be scrubbed from a user's taste profile, and it's available to both free and premium accounts.
Spotify has rolled out a new global mobile setting for Free and Premium users that lets them remove children's and family music from their taste profile. Once toggled off in settings, songs from kids' movies, nursery rhymes and family show themes will no longer factor into personalized features like Wrapped, Discover Weekly, or Daily Mix, even retroactively. Users can still search, play, and playlist that music without it affecting their recommendations.
Spotify rolled out a new setting that lets account holders exclude children's and family music from their taste profile, keeping it out of Wrapped summaries and personalized recommendations. The feature is available now on mobile for both Free and Premium users worldwide and works automatically once turned on.
Máuhan M Zonoozy, who previously led innovation at Spotify and founded remix startup Bubbl before its acquisition by Cricket Media, has launched A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building small apps for playing with sound and vocals. The company secured $5.5 million in pre-seed funding from investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, and former Spotify advertising executive Dawn Ostroff, who is advising the venture. Rather than one product, the startup releases experimental apps as 'singles,' such as a Chrome extension called Speed Surfer that alters browser audio and a stem-mixing tool called Stacks.
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup founded by former Spotify innovation head Máuhan M Zonoozy, has closed a $5.5 million pre-seed round from investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, and Dawn Ostroff. The company builds a series of small apps and web tools, like Speed Surfer and Stacks, that let users manipulate and remix sound and vocals rather than generate music via AI prompts.
Ikea has released the Badkruka, a new wireless speaker priced at $59.99 in the US, following up on its tiny $10 Kallsup speaker shown at CES 2026. Unlike the pocket-sized Kallsup, the roughly seven-inch Badkruka has no rechargeable battery and requires a constant power source, and it comes in only two finishes: black or a wood-grain-style pink.
An independent pricing tracker compiled monthly rates for nine flagship streaming tiers—Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium and Spotify—comparing March 2021 to today. The combined monthly cost for the same services rose from $95.91 to $154.41, a 61% jump equal to $702 more annually, without any downgrades or cancellations factored in.
The Verge's Decoder podcast, hosted by Nilay Patel with producers Nick Statt and Greg Ott, released a mailbag episode responding to audience feedback gathered since April across email, YouTube, Spotify, Bluesky and Threads. The hosts singled out a prior video described as the 'software brain' segment as the most discussed piece of content on the show in the past six months.