voyage spotify

How to stream the new ABBA Voyage songs online

Listen to the latest tracks from ABBA Voyage

For the first time in 40 years, ABBA is ready to make us fall in love with its disco-pop tracks all over again with its new studio album, Voyage. While the full album won't be playable until 5 November later this year, you can listen to the first two tracks online right now.

Alongside the release of Don't Shut Me Down and I Still Have Faith In You, ABBA has announced a new concert too. Called ABBA Voyage (confusing, we know) the pop stars will be brought to life using virtual avatars alongside a 10-piece live band in a custom-built arena at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London.

Much like the music on their new album, ABBA Voyage will blend the old and new into a music experience you don't want to miss. Though if you can't wait until Spring 2022 to get a taste of what ABBA has to offer us, here's how you can boogie down to two of their new songs today.

• Can VR concerts save a music industry brought to its knees by Covid-19?
• How can Spotify keep artists happy? Live music events , apparently
• Which is better? Apple Music vs Spotify

How can I listen to ABBA’s new music?

Thankfully ABBA's new music isn't exclusive to any one streaming service, and there isn't a tricky technique to have to use to access it. It's all available right now on all of the best music streaming services out there. That includes popular favorites like Spotify , Apple Music , and Amazon Music as well as all the others you can find links to from ABBA's official page .

You can even find music videos for the new tracks on YouTube along with a trailer for the new ABBA concert.

If you want to snag tickets to ABBA Voyage they will go on sale to the public at 5 AM ET / 10 AM BST / 7 PM ACT on 7 September. You can find out more and register your interest on the ABBA Voyage page to get early access, too.

• Check out: the best headphones of 2021

Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox

Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.

Hamish is a Senior Staff Writer for TechRadar and you’ll see his name appearing on articles across nearly every topic on the site from smart home deals to speaker reviews to graphics card news and everything in between. He uses his broad range of knowledge to help explain the latest gadgets and if they’re a must-buy or a fad fueled by hype. Though his specialty is writing about everything going on in the world of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The Acolyte episode 6 spawns two new fan theories about Manny Jacinto's Qimir, and I think one is absolutely true

Netflix is kicking subscribers off its old cheap ad-free plan – now they have a tricky choice

Google Docs, look out—there's a new private alternative in town

Most Popular

• BETTER LOVE

• Listening on…
• Switch Spotify device
• Open in Spotify Web Player
• Change playback source
• Open on YouTube website

Loading player…

Scrobble from Spotify?

Connect your Spotify account to your Last.fm account and scrobble everything you listen to, from any Spotify app on any device or platform.

Connect to Spotify

• Play similar artists

Latest release

24 June 2024

Popular this week

536 listeners

Join others and track this artist

Scrobble, find and rediscover music with a Last.fm account

Related Tags

• symphonic metal
• gothic metal

Downtown Binary

• Last 7 days
• Last 30 days
• Last 90 days
• Last 180 days
• Last 365 days

View all tracks

• Most popular
• By release date

41,716 listeners

31,895 listeners

4 May 2018 · 1 track

26,912 listeners

10 Jun 2022 · 1 track

17,550 listeners

17 Sep 2017 · 1 track

View all albums

Scrobble Stats ?

What is scrobbling.

Scrobbling is when Last.fm tracks the music you listen to and automatically adds it to your music profile.

Recent Listening Trend

Upcoming events.

We don’t have any upcoming events for this artist right now.

Add event View all events

Add image 1 more photo

Add image 13 more photos

External Links

• Twitter (@Voyage_synths)

Don't want to see ads? Upgrade Now

Javascript is required to view shouts on this page. Go directly to shout page

Similar Artists

54,758 listeners

60,386 listeners

44,774 listeners

58,365 listeners

Emil Rottmayer

77,061 listeners

A.L.I.S.O.N

131,040 listeners

View all similar artists

Trending Tracks

View all trending tracks

News » Francis Mercier Announces New Single ‘Voyage Voyage’

Francis mercier announces new single ‘voyage voyage’.

Francis Mercier has announced the upcoming release of ‘Voyage Voyage’: a reworked rendition of Desireless’ 1986 hit, dropping December 12th.

‘Voyage Voyage’ is a collaboration between Francis Mercier, the Swiss Production trio Mont Rouge, and composer and live performer Coco.

The original ‘Voyage Voyage’ has 150 million streams on Spotify alone and transcended the language barrier on the music charts, becoming a huge international success between 1986 and 1988, reaching the top position in more than ten countries across Europe.

With a modern twist, this new production rejuvenates the vibe with a vibrant afro and melodic house flavour and is set for release via Ultra Records on the 15th of December .

Francis Mercier has established himself as a dominant force. He has racked up an impressive collaboration resume, including tracks like ‘Kamili’, produced alongside Nitefreak and Idd Aziz, and ‘Sete’ released as a joint project with BLOND:ISH and Amadou & Mariam.

His taste for collaboration continues as he joins forces with Mont Rouge, an up-and-coming production team whose dynamic signature style has already garnered them praise and support. Plus, with Coco on production, the soundscape covers various influences.

Mark your calendars for the 15th of December, and a classic gets a twist.

‘Voyage Voyage’ is available on all major streaming stores and online stores from December 15th via Ultra Records.

Find Francis Mercier on Instagram .

Find Mont Rouge on Instagram

Find Coco on Instagram .

Follow Attack Magazine

Looking for something else....

The Secrets of Dance Music Production

The world-leading book on dance music production. Comes with samples too.

Acid House T-Shirt

Long live acid house!

Patch & Tweak

A stunning book that shows what modular syntheses means to different people.

Replicants – Elektron Analog Rytm Sample Pack

Electro sounds for the Elektron Analog Rytm. Free your spirit.

7th December, 2023

News - Max Richter Announces SRM Sounds And New Piano Instrument

News - Catch Quest On Tour This Month

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You currently have an ad blocker installed

Attack Magazine is funded by advertising revenue. To help support our original content, please consider whitelisting Attack in your ad blocker software.

Find out how

A WEEKLY SELECTION OF OUR BEST ARTICLES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

Introducing Voyager: Spotify’s New Nearest-Neighbor Search Library

For the past decade, Spotify has used approximate nearest-neighbor search technology to power our personalization, recommendation, and search systems.

These technologies allow engineers and researchers to build systems that recommend similar items (like similar tracks, artists, or albums) without needing to run slow and expensive machine learning algorithms in real time.

Spotify led the pack by building and open sourcing Annoy , our hugely popular nearest-neighbor search library, back in 2013. Since then, Annoy has served us extremely well, powering features like Discover Weekly, Home, and countless others.

The evolving nearest-neighbor ecosystem

Over the past decade, the state of the art in nearest-neighbor search has advanced considerably. Annoy is now solidly in the middle of the pack , and there are systems out there that can produce results twice as accurate in the same amount of time or similar-quality results in one-tenth the time.

In addition to technical advances, the nearest-neighbor search ecosystem is growing quickly: many vendors offer nearest-neighbor search as part of their database offerings (Weaviate, Pinecone, Vespa, Chromadb), and many traditional database engines are also adding support for vector-based search (e.g., pgvector in PostgreSQL).

While accuracy and speed are two major factors in comparing nearest-neighbor technologies, others are important to Spotify’s engineers:

• Flexibility: Each application of nearest-neighbor search has different needs and constraints. Being able to customize every part of the search algorithm is incredibly useful as it can allow a balance to be struck among maximum performance, maximum throughput, minimum latency, and minimum cost.
• Statelessness: Many of Spotify’s systems use nearest-neighbor search in memory, enabling stateless deployments (via Kubernetes) and almost entirely removing the maintenance and cost burden of maintaining a stateful database cluster.
• Language support: Backend and data engineers at Spotify prefer to deploy production systems on JVM-based languages, like Java and Scala, to maximize performance — while many machine learning use cases operate with Python. Many of the newer nearest-neighbor technologies have poor support for languages other than Python, or they provide client libraries for many languages but require running a database process alongside the deployment.
• Cost: The most advanced nearest-neighbor algorithms are incredibly fast and produce extremely high-quality output. But to do so, they often require large amounts of memory. For most use cases, extreme accuracy can be sacrificed for a significant decrease in cost.

Voyager: Spotify’s solution

Since 2018, many teams across Spotify have been experimenting with an open source library for nearest-neighbor search called hnswlib (pronounced “h-n-s-w lib”). This library offers a tenfold speed increase over Annoy, and it was very useful as we scaled up to use cases that required higher-dimensional embeddings.

However, as we deployed it at scale, we identified a significant number of changes we wanted to make to hnswlib. These changes included modifications to its on-disk data format and its API and substantial architectural changes to make the codebase easier to maintain. Changes like this break backward compatibility, which is very hard to do when a software package has lots of users — and hnswlib already has more than 700,000 downloads every month.

To work around this issue, we decided to build a new package entirely. We call it Voyager — because it searches through vector space s, just like NASA’s Voyager space probes.

Voyager is a new nearest-neighbor search library based on hnswlib, intended to succeed Annoy as Spotify’s recommended nearest-neighbor search library for production use. Voyager combines the increased accuracy and speed from HNSW with well-tested, well-documented, and production-ready bindings for both Java and Python.

What Voyager offers

Voyager’s philosophy is to offer a rock-solid, stable, production-ready library that allows anybody to add nearest-neighbor index lookup to their application, in Python or Java. Its features include:

• More than 10 times the speed of Annoy (at the same recall) or up to 50% more accuracy (at the same speed)
• Up to 4 times less memory usage than Annoy (thanks to E4M3 8-bit floating point)
• Fully multithreaded index creation and querying
• Fully supported Python and Java bindings with identical interfaces
• Production-ready, fault-tolerant index files with corruption detection
• Google Cloud Platform–compatible stream-based I/O (stream indices from Google Cloud Services!)
• Built-in support for string-based identifiers (i.e., query by URI)
• 16 times less memory usage versus hnswlib at index creation time
• Dependency-free install: only NumPy (any version) in Python, and no Java dependencies
• MacOS, Windows, and Linux support for both x86 and arm64 CPUs.
• Full Python and Java documentation

Voyager in production

This blog post isn’t an announcement of what we plan to do; rather, it’s an announcement of what we’ve been doing for almost a year. Voyager is battle tested, having been used by many teams at Spotify to serve production traffic since 2022. And now it’s open source on GitHub for all to use.

To try out Voyager, check out spotify.github.io/voyager – or just pip install voyager in Python to get started.

You can also hear more about Voyager in episode 23 of NerdOut@Spotify .

Sign up for engineering updates

Navigation Menu

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests..., provide feedback.

We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously.

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly.

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation .

• Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

🛰️ An approximate nearest-neighbor search library for Python and Java with a focus on ease of use, simplicity, and deployability.

spotify/voyager

Folders and files, repository files navigation.

Voyager is a library for performing fast approximate nearest-neighbor searches on an in-memory collection of vectors.

Voyager features bindings to both Python and Java, with feature parity and index compatibility between both languages. It uses the HNSW algorithm, based on the open-source hnswlib package , with numerous features added for convenience and speed. Voyager is used extensively in production at Spotify, and is queried hundreds of millions of times per day to power numerous user-facing features.

Think of Voyager like Sparkey , but for vector/embedding data; or like Annoy , but with much higher recall . It got its name because it searches through (embedding) space(s), much like the Voyager interstellar probes launched by NASA in 1977.

Installation

Add the following artifact to your pom.xml :

You can find the latest version on Voyager's Releases page .

Add the following artifact to your build.sbt :

Compatibility

Contributing.

Contributions to voyager are welcomed! See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Voyager is copyright 2022-2024 Spotify AB.

Voyager is licensed under the Apache 2 License.

Code of conduct

Releases 10, contributors 6.

• Python 24.8%

Fast, Simple, In-Memory Nearest Neighbor Search

Voyager provides approximate nearest-neighbor search in Python and Java. It's up to 10 times faster than Annoy, while using 4 times less memory and providing more features.

Tuned for lighting-fast production use at Spotify, Voyager provides near-instantaneous nearest-neighbor lookups on in-memory collections of embeddings — without requiring GPUs — so you can power millions of requests per day at millisecond latencies.

Well-Documented

Need an example to get started? Voyager includes documentation for every method, and a comprehensive guide for common use cases. With a strongly-typed API in both Python or Java, you can have your IDE guide you with autocomplete every step of the way — or check out Voyager's documentation.

Easy to Integrate

Add Voyager to your existing application with just one line of code. No dependencies or setup required. Voyager works with all popular Python and Java versions, on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Just import voyager in Python or import com.spotify.voyager; in Java and go!

Lightweight

Voyager is built to minimize resource usage. There's no server to start, no resources to keep running in the background, and no operational overhead. Add Voyager to your application code and you can search through millions of embeddings while only using gigabytes of memory.

Check out a demo of how to use Voyager in both Python and Java in 5 minutes:

You can hear more from the Voyager team on the NerdOut@Spotify podcast:

• Open Source @ Spotify
• @SpotifyEng
• Spotify R&D on LinkedIn
• NerdOut@Spotify Podcast
• Spotify R&D Engineering
• Spotify R&D Research
• Spotify R&D Design
• Life at Spotify

• Spotify-stock
• News for Spotify

Spotify’s Positive Financial Trajectory: Aligning with Guidance and Expanding Monetization

Analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich of Bank of America Securities reiterated a Buy rating on Spotify Technology SA ( SPOT – Research Report ), boosting the price target to $380.00.

Jessica Reif Ehrlich’s rating is based on confidence in Spotify Technology SA’s upcoming second-quarter results, which are anticipated to align with the company’s guidance on crucial business metrics. Ehrlich predicts that the company will hit their revenue targets, with a slight increase from the €3.8 billion guidance to an estimated €3.83 billion. Additionally, she forecasts steady growth in both monthly active users (MAUs) and premium subscribers, with expectations matching the company’s projections. Gross margins are also expected to be consistent with guidance, reinforcing the positive outlook on the company’s financial performance. Ehrlich’s analysis suggests that any operational income (OI) forecast deviation, adjusted below guidance, accounts for non-cash social charges, which doesn’t detract from the overall positive trajectory. Furthermore, Ehrlich underscores Spotify’s potential for increased monetization and margin expansion, driven by strategic initiatives and price increases. The company has demonstrated a capacity to elevate subscription costs without significantly impacting user retention, showcasing strong market confidence. The introduction of varied pricing tiers and the expansion into new business avenues, such as audiobooks, are seen as additional opportunities for revenue growth. Ehrlich has adjusted the company’s forecast to accommodate for increased social costs but has simultaneously raised revenue and OI estimates to reflect the impact of recent price hikes. Overall, the positive momentum in share price, combined with operational strategies for revenue and margin improvement, substantiate Ehrlich’s Buy rating and increased price objective for Spotify’s stock.

In another report released yesterday, Morgan Stanley also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $370.00 price target.

TipRanks tracks over 100,000 company insiders, identifying the select few who excel in timing their transactions. By upgrading to TipRanks Premium, you will gain access to this exclusive data and discover crucial insights to guide your investment decisions. Begin your TipRanks Premium journey today.

Spotify Technology SA (SPOT) Company Description:

Founded in 2006, Luxembourg-based Spotify Technology SA is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service. It serves a community of over 320 million users across 92 markets. The company generates revenue from Premium and Ad-Supported segments. The Premium segment provides subscribers with unlimited online and offline high-quality streaming access to music and podcasts. It also offers a music listening experience without commercial breaks. The Ad-Supported segment provides on-demand online access to its catalog of music and unlimited online access to the catalog of podcasts to its subscribers with no subscription fees. The company also provides sales, marketing, contract research and development, and customer support services.

Read More on SPOT:

• NFLX vs. SPOT: Which Streaming Stock Is the Better Buy?
• NMPA files FTC complaint against Spotify, Rolling Stone reports
• Spotify to introduce more expensive premium plan for music lovers, Bloomberg says
• Spotify to introduce new higher-priced premium plan, Bloomberg says
• Twitch boosts U.S. subscription prices for the first time, Engadget reports

Spotify News MORE

Related stocks.

AYUN MAPU (REDUX)

in the blog

Ajeet's healing, jai-jagadeesh, featured playlist, dancing spirit.

Mirabai Ceiba

Ayun mapu (redux).

Sukhmani Ram Dass Grecco Buratto

First breath.

Healing Song

Jai-Jagdeesh

Leonardo Prakash

Let it Breathe

Mirabai Ceiba Minük

Canto por méxico.

Dr. Ramdesh

GuruGanesha Singh

Gurunam Singh

Krishna Kaur

Nirinjan Kaur

Prabhu Nam Kaur

Sirgun Kaur

Snatam Kaur

Thomas Barquee

Jai-Jagdeesh - Dancing Under Water [Official Lyric Video]

Ajeet - Catch the Moonlight [Official Lyric Video]

Leonardo Prakash - Dry Leaves (Official Lyric Video)

Ajeet - Blooming [Official Lyric Video]

Ram Dass - April 13 [Official Lyric Video]

Ajeet - Let It Breathe [Official Lyric Video]

Ram Dass - Trust in the Blue (Official Lyric Video)

Jai-Jagdeesh - Road to Somewhere [Official Lyric Video]

Artists on tour

Spotify tests emergency alerts in Sweden

Music, podcasts, audiobooks…emergency alerts? Spotify’s latest test has the streaming app venturing into new territory with a test of an emergency alerts system in its home market of Sweden. According to code references found within the Spotify app, the company is considering a system that would help distribute public announcements related to things like “accidents, serious events or disruptions of important services.”

The company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s testing such a system, but didn’t explain why it would be interested in providing this kind of service to its users. There’s no Swedish law requiring the app to do so and Spotify says that, for now, it’s only exploring whether or not the app could support something like an emergency alerts system.

The feature was first uncovered by technologist and reverse engineer Chris Messina , who theorized that an emergency alerts service could push Spotify users to enable their app notifications. Often, users disable alerts from non-essential apps, like those in the social networking or entertainment space, which makes it more difficult for the app to catch users’ attention and market its new features.

But more broadly, supporting emergency alerts could also solidify Spotify’s position as a more essential app to have on hand. It also steps into Meta’s territory, as the social network has for nearly a decade offered ways for users to get updates during major disasters with its Safety Check feature. Google also leveraged its app’s popularity to alert users of disasters, as with its earthquake alerts on Android . In the U.S., lawmakers have previously weighed the idea of requiring online video and streaming apps to support emergency alerts in addition to TV and radio broadcasters and cable TV systems.

Code references in Spotify’s app mention the feature across the following phrases:

• “Emergency alerts in Sweden”
• “Receive public emergency alerts”
• “Important public announcement, IPA, is the system used to alert the public in Sweden in the case of accidents, serious events, or disruptions of important services”
• “Visit the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency site for more information”

Reached for comment, a company rep for Spotify confirmed the test in a statement, adding it was only being tested in Sweden for the time being.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience,” they said. “Some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience while most serve only as an important learning.”

More TechCrunch

Get the industry’s biggest tech news, techcrunch daily news.

Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.

Startups Weekly

Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.

TechCrunch Fintech

The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Tuesday.

TechCrunch Mobility

TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.

In a major update, Proton adds privacy-safe document collaboration to Drive, its freemium E2EE cloud storage service

Collaborative document features are being made available inside Proton Drive, further extending the company’s trademark pitch of robust security.

Telegram lets creators share paid content to channels

Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels…

Altrove uses AI models and lab automation to create new materials

For the past couple of years, innovation has been accelerating in new materials development. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this innovation cycle.…

Indian social network Koo is shutting down as buyout talks collapse

The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is ceasing operations after its last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed. Despite securing over…

Europe is still serious about ESG, and Apiday is helping companies comply

Apiday leverages AI to save time for its customers. But like legacy consultants, it also offers human expertise.

Google’s environmental report pointedly avoids AI’s actual energy cost

Google totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI is using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care to say.”

SpaceX wants to launch up to 120 times a year from Florida — and competitors aren’t happy about it

SpaceX’s ambitious plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center are causing a stir among some of its competitors. Late last…

Newsletter writer covering Evolve Bank’s data breach says the bank sent him a cease and desist letter

The situation around a data breach that’s affected an ever-growing number of fintech companies has gotten even weirder. Evolve Bank & Trust announced last week that it was hacked and…

Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new ‘byline’ feature

The new bylines go beyond the typical @username references that often accompany link posts from news publications and those pointing to other written content, like a WordPress blog or Substack

X weighs adding a downvote button to replies — but it doesn’t want to emulate Reddit

code references found in the X iOS app indicate that the company could be considering adding downvotes for replies only to improve how they’re ranked.

Yieldstreet says some of its customers were affected by the Evolve Bank data breach

Evolve, a popular financial institution for fintech startups, announced that a cyberattack affected “the data and personal information of some Evolve retail bank customers and financial technology partners’ customers.” 

Evolve hack fallout continues, fintech M&A heats up and Plaid talks enterprise push

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at the Evolve Bank hack, three notable acquisitions, Plaid’s enterprise customer growth and more. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and…

What You Need to Raise a Series A Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

Raising a Series A round in today’s competitive market can be a daunting task. To equip seed-stage founders with the insights and strategies needed for success, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will…

Snapchat’s latest features help users personalize their accounts

Snapchat is introducing new ways for users to personalize their accounts, the company announced on Tuesday. The updates, which are mostly available for Snapchat+ subscribers, allow users to do things…

Meta plans to bring generative AI to metaverse games

Meta plans to bring more generative AI tech into games, specifically VR, AR and mixed reality games, as the company looks to reinvigorate its flagging metaverse strategy. According to a…

Featured Article

News outlets are accusing Perplexity of plagiarism and unethical web scraping

In the age of generative AI, when chatbots can provide detailed answers to questions based on content pulled from the internet, the line between fair use and plagiarism, and between routine web scraping and unethical summarization, is a thin one.  Perplexity AI is a startup that combines a search engine…

Figma disables its AI design feature that appeared to be ripping off Apple’s Weather app

The Make Design feature is available within Figma’s software and will generate UI (user interface) layouts and components from text prompts.

Computing and shielding startups join forces to put AI-capable chips in space

Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computing systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running on iMacs in the late 1990s. …

Industry Ventures raises a $900M fund for investing in small, early-stage VCs and their breakout startups

The venture fundraising trend in 2024 is fairly clear by now: Large, established VC firms are continuing to attract capital from limited partners, while smaller, newer funds are finding it…

Husband-and-wife former Olympians target $50M for new fund to invest in influencer-led consumer brands

Samyr Laine and Ayanna Alexander-Laine now put their grit and determination to work for founders wanting to launch and scale consumer brands.

As the AI boom gobbles up power, Phaidra is helping companies manage datacenter power more efficiently

Electricity demand is booming on account of AI. In a May 2024 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030, up from…

Sensorita uses digital twins to help waste management companies streamline construction waste

The amount of waste produced by the construction industry adds up to more than a third of the overall waste produced each year in the European Union. And it’s no…

Beauty tech startup BoldHue raises capital to ship its ‘Keurig for makeup’

BoldHue’s device essentially scans your face and dispenses a customized foundation formula that matches your skin tone.

Indian edtech Unacademy cuts another 250 jobs

Unacademy is slashing another 250 jobs in latest round of cuts as Indian edtech sector continues to struggle.Q

Apple adds support for new languages across lock screen, keyboard and search on iOS 18

Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the last few weeks with extended support for…

Anthropic looks to fund a new, more comprehensive generation of AI benchmarks

Anthropic is launching a program to fund the development of new types of benchmarks capable of evaluating the performance and impact of AI models, including generative models like its own…

Senators urge owners, partners and VC backers of fintech Synapse to restore customers’ access to their money

A group of senators has banded together to urge Synapse’s owners and bank and fintech partners to “immediately restore customers’ access to their money.” As part of their demands, the…

TechCrunch Space: Star spangled

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. I hope everyone has a fantastic July 4 this week. Go eat a hot dog. Read my story from last week on the…

Music, podcasts, audiobooks…emergency alerts? Spotify’s latest test has the streaming app venturing into new territory with a test of an emergency alerts system in its home market of Sweden. According…

YouTube now lets you request removal of AI-generated content that simulates your face or voice

Simply submitting the request for a takedown doesn’t necessarily mean the content will be removed, however.

• 2023 Wrapped
• About Spotify
• Press Center

Life at Spotify

• Safety at Spotify
• Diversity & Inclusion

Stream On 2023

During Stream On, we’ll share new developments to help creators continue to chart pathways to success and build a truly global audience.

Time to Play Fair

When competition is fair, both consumers and companies win. Learn about our efforts to even the playing field for all developers.

Spotify Loud & Clear

Artists deserve clarity about the economics of music streaming. This site sheds light on the global streaming economy and royalty system.

Spotify x FC Barcelona

Music and football come together in a way that’s entirely new in our partnership with FC Barcelona.

For Artists

For podcasters, for advertisers, for developers, for investors, for engineering, for vendors, for songwriters, for help, chat & ideas.

• Search for:
• Get Spotify
• Company Info
• Communities

Spotify Communities

Here’s All the Artists, Creators, and Athletes You Can Blend with on Spotify

August 29, 2023

In 2021, Spotify took bonding over music to the next level with Blend , our shared social listening experience that combines the different tastes of friends and families, as well as fans and artists, into one. Whether you’re creating a Blend with your best friend, favorite musical artist , FC Barcelona player, or digital creator, you’re sure to receive a personalized playlist that merges your musical tastes to create something everyone can enjoy.

There’s now plenty of artists, athletes, and creators to Blend with on Spotify, and you can find the full list below. To create your own Blend with one of them, simply click the link in their name—and then let us do the rest. You’ll also receive a taste-match score and the songs that bring you two together.

How Spotify Blend Creates a Connection Between Fans, Friends, and Artists

Discover more.

Listeners Can Now Blend With Their Favorite Creators on Spotify

Blend With FC Barcelona and See How Your Musical Tastes Compare to Your Favorite Players

K-Pop Fans Can Now Blend With Some of Their Favorite Groups on Spotify

Windows on Arm finally has legs

Microsoft and qualcomm have convinced software developers to lean into their latest arm push..

By Tom Warren , a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.

Share this story

When I first used the Arm-powered Surface Pro X in 2019, I loved the hardware but disliked the software experience . Everything felt like it was lagging. Microsoft didn’t have native versions of Edge or its Office apps, and it was clear the Surface Pro X had been released too early. With little support from developers, Windows on Arm was unlikely to succeed.

Nearly five years later, the Windows on Arm experience has improved dramatically. Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors deliver a Windows 11 experience that feels like any regular laptop. Microsoft and Qualcomm have also been pushing software developers to create more ARM64 native apps, and it has made a huge difference.

Apps like Photoshop, Dropbox, and Zoom are all native, as are entertainment apps like Spotify, Prime, and Hulu. Even Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Vivaldi, Edge, and Brave are all on Arm now. That’s a good start, but there are still many apps that will have to be emulated on these latest Copilot Plus PCs, which is where Microsoft’s Prism emulator comes in.

Microsoft claims Prism is as efficient as Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer and can emulate apps twice as fast as the previous generation of Windows on Arm devices. I’ve been testing the Surface Laptop over the past week and haven’t run into the erratic behavior I saw on Microsoft’s previous emulator, which also impacted battery life on the Surface Pro X. But I also haven’t seen the dramatic improvements in emulated app performance that Microsoft promised.

Microsoft’s claims are difficult to test without comparing previous Arm-based devices. YouTuber Gary Explains did exactly that , comparing the x86 or x64 versions of Firefox, Cinebench R23, and HandBrake on a Surface Pro X without Prism and then with the latest Windows 11 24H2 update that includes Prism.

Gary Explains found that Prism gave a 10 percent performance improvement in Speedometer 3 running on Firefox, an 8 percent jump in Cinebench R23 single core, and a 4.5 percent improvement in Cinebench R23 multicore compared to the previous emulator. HandBrake performance also improved by 8 percent thanks to Prism.

In my own testing, I’ve found that Prism handles compatibility for non-native apps well, but the performance varies depending on the complexity of the app. ShareX, a screenshot tool, works fine using the Prism emulator, but it’s a lightweight app. iA Writer and Notion aren’t native, but they run well on these latest Snapdragon chips, too. Discord also performs a lot better than I’ve seen on Arm in the past, but there’s still some occasional stuttering and a slight lag navigating between servers.

For more heavyweight apps, Prism doesn’t bring the experience up to what you’d find on an Intel- or AMD-powered laptop. Adobe’s Premiere Pro running emulated was practically unusable for editing a 4K video on the Surface Laptop, which is probably why Adobe is now blocking the installation of the x64 version on Snapdragon X Elite and Plus processors. An ARM64 version of Premiere Pro is planned for later this year.

Blender is another example of an emulated app with underwhelming performance. Blender doesn’t detect Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, so everything hits the CPU instead. The performance for rendering projects is terrible as a result, with one test I performed taking more than 15 minutes to complete, compared to just over two minutes on a 13-inch MacBook Air M3. Blender will soon have a native ARM64 version, but I tested the early alpha copy, and it only marginally improved the results because it’s still not picking up the GPU correctly.

Intel has dominated the laptop GPU market with its integrated solutions for decades, so I suspect Qualcomm still needs to engage with developers of software like Blender to ensure apps are optimized for its GPUs. Blender illustrates that Microsoft’s Prism emulator can’t solve everything.

Speaking of GPUs, games also don’t “just work” on the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, despite Qualcomm’s assurances. I didn’t make a big deal out of this for the Surface Laptop review because it’s not a gaming laptop, but gaming on Windows on Arm is disappointing right now. Shadow of the Tomb Raider kept crashing for me when I attempted to play, and most of the other games I tried just refused to launch. Fall Guys throws up an unsupported error, as does Halo Infinite . Destiny 2 didn’t even launch — no error, just a whole lot of nothing. Starfield did the same.

There aren’t many native Windows on Arm games, so Prism has its work cut out for it here. I managed to get Grand Theft Auto V working but with lots of frame stuttering. Cyberpunk 2077 also ran on the Surface Laptop 7th Edition but at around 26fps on average at low settings on 1080p resolution. The Witcher 3 , Baldur’s Gate 3 , Control , Rocket League , and Minecraft all worked out of the box, too.

The biggest issue here is that most anticheat services use kernel drivers that aren’t supported by emulation . BattlEye, a widely used anticheat service, is one of the rare exceptions that supports Windows on Arm, but it seems games like Destiny 2 that utilize this anticheat software will need to be updated to run properly here. Thankfully, there is a dedicated website that tracks which games are supported and run well. I’m not holding out much hope for Arm-powered gaming laptops anytime soon, though.

Another thing I’ve run into is apps just refusing to install. Google Drive is the big one here, as it throws up an error about the Windows architecture of Copilot Plus PCs not being supported. Google’s Drive app on Windows integrates into the shell much like Dropbox, which is something Microsoft didn’t originally support on Windows on Arm. There is, however, a native version of Dropbox that integrates into File Explorer, so hopefully Google is able to deliver a similar experience soon.

There are compatibility issues with external devices, too. I’ve seen reports about Brother printers and scanners not working well on Arm or simply that generic printer drivers don’t support all of the features you’d expect. There’s no easy quick fix for accessories that require driver support, and that’s only likely to come based on the sheer amount of people using these new Copilot Plus PCs. I’m less concerned about the driver issues here because I think most people will be able to plug in the type of accessories (webcams, printers, storage drives) you use on a laptop and have them up and running with the built-in drivers in Windows 11.

VPN apps are still an issue on Windows Arm, too. Bitdefender, NordVPN, and Private Internet Access don’t work. VPN developers use TAP and TUN virtual adapters and devices and need a signed driver from Microsoft to work correctly. Fortunately, Android Authority reports that VPN developers are working on ARM64 versions.

That’s encouraging because the last time I used Windows on Arm regularly in 2019 , I said, “Most of the apps I use on a daily basis haven’t been recompiled for ARM and probably never will be.” Now, it feels like app compatibility on Windows on Arm is changing on a daily basis, which is a scenario I wasn’t expecting to see five years ago.

While we’re in this transition point, you may need to use beta versions or download special builds of Windows apps that are ARM64 native — much like the macOS transition. That means the Windows Store versions of apps aren’t always ARM64, and you might be able to find the improved version on the web before the app store version is updated. That was the case initially with Slack earlier this month before the store version got updated.

For everything else, Microsoft does have some tools for power users that might improve app compatibility on Arm with existing unmodified x86 or x64 apps. There’s a program compatibility troubleshooter that can help enable or disable emulation settings, and you can also toggle these in the properties of an executable. You can control things like hybrid execution mode to force the use of x86-only binaries, disable floating point optimization that could impact performance, and much more. You can also modify how an emulated app uses multiple CPU cores, which might improve performance or compatibility in certain apps.

Ultimately, it’s down to app developers to focus on native ARM64 support for their apps. The sheer amount of native apps that are now available shows things are heading in the right direction. These new Qualcomm chips also provide the brute-force power to emulate apps a little better, alongside Microsoft’s Prism improvements. Day to day, I think most people won’t even run into app issues here because a lot of the key apps are already native or run well in emulation.

I’m confident a lot more ARM64 apps are still on the way. During my testing, benchmark tools and apps were updated to support ARM64, catching me by surprise. I’m willing to bet that we won’t be discussing Prism or emulated app performance as much in a year or two because native ARM64 apps will be as common as x64 apps are today after the transition from x86 began in the early 2000s. After 12 years of attempts to transition to Windows on Arm, it feels like Microsoft is finally about to succeed.

Notepad by Tom Warren /

A weekly newsletter uncovering the secrets and strategy behind Microsoft’s era-defining bets on AI, gaming, and computing.

Xbox Live is back after an outage lasting several hours

Netflix is starting to phase out its cheapest ad-free plan, figma pulls ai tool after criticism that it ripped off apple’s design, apple’s vision pro: five months later, tap-to-pay could get more capable and more complicated.

More from Microsoft

Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks in July

Know the price-matching policies for Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and others

Microsoft’s canceled Xbox cloud console gets detailed in new patent

Forza Horizon 4 will be delisted from Microsoft stores and Steam in December