Barcelona downgraded by credit ratings agency amid Spotify Camp Nou delays Sport Business Credit ratings agency Morningstar DBRS has downgraded the outlook for FC Barcelona due to delays in rebuilding their stadium, Spotify Camp Nou. The agency kept Barcelona’s main credit rating at BBB but changed their projections from “Positive” to “Stable”. The Spanish champions have faced repeated delays in reopening their revamped home, which will have a [...]
Why I’ve fallen back in love with the iPod Life&Style In a world where digital ownership is increasingly rare, Simon Hunt returned to technology from 2007 – and hasn’t looked back. Not since childhood had I been this excited to open a parcel. I tore through layers of brown sticky tape, clawed through the cardboard box and unpeeled the bubble wrap. And there it was: [...]
Copyright isn’t dead in the age of AI, it’s key to growing UK creative industries Opinion Copyright is not a brake on innovation. It is the market mechanism that turns British creativity into investment and the route to responsible AI, says Ed Vaizey The creative industries are not a side hustle for the British economy. They are a serious growth engine. The UK’s music industry alone generates around £8bn in GVA [...]
Monzo slammed for ‘shaming’ end of year reviews March 7, 2026 Digital bank Monzo has been accused of overstepping the mark by using data it holds on customers to call out their spending habits and lifestlye choices. The bank used data to tell one customer with a past eating disorder that she eats a lot of fast food, spends “more than most” on Just Eat takeaways, [...]
Spotify says UK music industry ‘in really strong position’ March 3, 2026 A year ago, the UK music industry was in a bout of slipping global chart shares and fewer breakthrough stars. Yet following this weekend’s Brit Awards, Spotify claims that export growth and rising royalty payments are pointing to an industry revival. In 2025, the streaming giant paid out £860m to UK artists and their rights [...]
Allica Bank joins fintech unicorn club after £100m injection February 24, 2026 Small business lender Allica Bank will join the illustrious club of British fintech unicorns after securing a fresh funding round. The challenger bank is said to have netted $155m (£111m) in a Series D fundraise, which will take the firm’s valuation to $1.2bn and over the billion pound mark to declare unicorn status. The round [...]
Spotify proves raising fees won’t stop listeners February 10, 2026 Spotify’s latest results show that despite prices rising and costs climbing, users are not leaving. The Swedish group added a record number of users in the final quarter of 2025, pushing monthly active users to 751 million and paid subscribers to 290 million. Revenue rose 13 per cent year on year on a constant-currency basis [...]
Can Spotify and Lloyds and Uber and Deliveroo and Apple and everyone stop wrapping my year, please! December 17, 2025 From Spotify to banking, data 'wraps' are taking over the festive period and exposing all our bad habits. Anna Moloney wants out.
Spotify’s integration into ChatGPT may not be a bad thing October 8, 2025 Spotify’s new partnership with OpenAI brings its music and podcast recommendations inside its LLM bot, ChatGPT, helping its users to discover and queue new music through conversations, rather than search. Listeners will be able to link their Spotify to ChatGPT, asking it to find anything from a specific playlist to a podcast topic. Across 145 [...]
Spotify creating new UK jobs after redundancies September 1, 2025 The UK arm of Spotify is creating new UK jobs this year after shedding more than 200 jobs in 2024 as its profit continued to rise despite a fall in revenue, it has been revealed. The division of the Swedish audio streaming giant cut its workforce from 1,039 employees during its latest financial year, according [...]