Business
Spotify woos video and podcast creators with new tools to better compete with YouTube

Swedish streaming audio giant Spotify is courting more video creators, podcasters and influencers in an effort to step up its competition with popular digital platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
The Stockholm-based company on Wednesday hosted creators at its office in Downtown L.A.’s Arts District, where executives showed off new features meant to make it easier for video makers to make money from their content and track their performance on the streaming service. The company is launching a new program to help creators earn more advertising and subscription revenue, Spotify said.
For example, Spotify Premium subscribers will soon be able to view videos on the service without ads. This comes after some video podcasters have groused about the number of commercial breaks in their shows, which can irritate paying listeners. Qualified creators can earn money based on how often the ad-free videos are streamed.
“Now, financial success and quality of your show aren’t at odds anymore — they are correlated,” said Spotify’s co-president and chief product and technology officer, Gustav Söderström, during the event.
Ad-free videos will start in January for premium users in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada. Spotify users who do not want to pay for a subscription can still listen to music, podcasts and audiobooks for free with ads. Video creators earn a share of those ad revenues. Audio-only podcasts will still have ads for Premium users.
Once a pure streaming music company, Spotify five years ago expanded into podcasting, buying podcast companies and later spending considerable sums to get exclusive deals with popular hosts including Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper. That helped diversify Spotify’s offering, but the company eventually pulled back on some big deals after overspending. It recalibrated its podcast strategy and laid off employees.
But podcasts remain a big draw for the service. Spotify has also added audiobooks to its catalog.
After the company’s review of its podcast strategy, Spotify moved away from its exclusive deals with podcasters and is now offering more financial incentives for creators to place videos on its platform, as consumer demand and creator interest in videos has gone up.
Spotify grew its video content in 2020, when the streaming service allowed podcasters to upload videos of their interviews and conversations. Today there are more than 300,000 video podcast shows on Spotify, the company said.
Spotify said more than 250 million users have streamed a video podcast. The number of creators posting videos monthly on the service has risen more than 50% year over year.
Bringing more video creators to the service could lead to users spending more time on its service. That could help Spotify decrease subscriber churn, increase advertising dollars and attract new customers.
Earlier this year, the streaming service launched music videos in around 100 markets (but not yet in the U.S.) and there are possibilities for other types of video content on the platform too.
“Who’s to say that we can’t imagine someday we’ll have authors talking about their books and (we would) be able to bridge you straight into listening to that book?” said Alex Norström, Spotify’s co-president and chief business officer, in an interview.
It also puts Spotify in a better position to compete with YouTube, which already shares advertising and subscription revenue with its video creators. YouTube offers its video library for free with ads and also sells YouTube Premium, which starts at $13.99 a month that gives ad-free access to its YouTube and YouTube Music.
Earlier this year, YouTube said it had more than 100 million Premium subscribers, including those on a trial subscription. YouTube’s free, ad-supported version has billions of users.
Spotify reported 640 million monthly active users in the third quarter, up 11% from a year ago. Spotify Premium has 252 million subscribers.
When asked by an analyst about Spotify’s scale, reach and engagement being smaller than YouTube’s, Spotify Chief Executive Daniel Ek said on an earnings call on Tuesday that “people make it out to be the winner-takes-all dynamic in that there’s only one player that can solve all of it,” but what creators want is to be on multiple platforms.
“That’s certainly what we learned in podcasting and that’s what we’re leaning into,” Ek said, adding that there are many creators on Spotify that only post parts of their content and “new creators that have needs which we aren’t yet fulfilling.”
Spotify executives said they believe the company has room to continue to grow. The company on Tuesday said it anticipates earning a full-year profit in 2024, which would make this Spotify’s first profitable year ever.

Business
California lawmakers approve expanded $750-million film tax credit program

After weathering a pandemic, dual strikes and massive wildfires, Hollywood is finally getting a lifeline.
California legislators voted Friday to more than double the amount allocated each year to the state’s film and television tax credit program, raising that cap to $750 million from $330 million.
The increase is a win for the studios, producers, unions and industry workers who have lobbied state legislators for months on the issue.
Other states and countries have increasingly lured productions away from California with generous tax credits and incentive programs, leaving many in Hollywood without work for months. In interviews, town halls and legislative committee hearings, industry workers said that without state intervention, they feared Tinseltown would be hollowed out, similar to Detroit after the heyday of its auto industry.
“It’s now time to get people back to work and bring production home to California,” Directors Guild of America executive and Entertainment Union Coalition President Rebecca Rhine said in a statement. “We call on the studios to recommit to the communities and workers across the state that built this industry and built their companies.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom called to expand the annual tax credit program last year, saying at the time that “the world we invented is now competing against us.”
From there, state lawmakers looked to expand the provisions of the program. A separate bill going through the Legislature would broaden the types of productions eligible to apply, including animated films, shorts and series and certain large-scale competition shows. It would also increase the tax credit to as much as 35% of qualified expenditures for movies and TV series shot in the Greater Los Angeles area and up to 40% for productions shot outside the region.
That bill, AB 1138, was unanimously approved Thursday by the state Senate Revenue and Tax Committee. It will be up for final votes next week.
California provides a 20% to 25% tax credit to offset qualified production expenses, such as money spent on film crews and building sets. Production companies can apply the credit toward any tax liabilities they have in California.
The bump to 35% puts California more in line with incentives offered by other states, such as Georgia, which provides a 30% credit for productions.
Lawmakers and industry insiders have said the increased tax credit cap and the proposed criteria changes to the incentive program must both be approved to make California more competitive for filming. The bill was written by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) and state Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica).
“After years of uncertainty, workers can once again set the stage, cue the lights, and roll the cameras — because California is keeping film and TV jobs anchored right here, where they belong,” Zbur said in a statement about the $750-million cap. “This is a historic investment in our creative economy, our working families, small businesses, and the communities that depend on this industry to thrive.”
Business
Contributor: AI isn't just standing by. It's doing things — without guardrails

Just two and a half years after OpenAI stunned the world with ChatGPT, AI is no longer only answering questions — it is taking actions. We are now entering the era of AI agents, in which AI large language models don’t just passively provide information in response to your queries, they actively go into the world and do things for — or potentially against — you.
AI has the power to write essays and answer complex questions, but imagine if you could enter a prompt and have it make a doctor’s appointment based on your calendar, or book a family flight with your credit card, or file a legal case for you in small claims court.
An AI agent submitted this op-ed. (I did, however, write the op-ed myself because I figured the Los Angeles Times wouldn’t publish an AI-generated piece, and besides I can put in random references like I’m a Cleveland Browns fan because no AI would ever admit to that.)
I instructed my AI agent to find out what email address The Times uses for op-ed submissions, the requirements for the submission, and then to draft the email title, draft an eye-catching pitch paragraph, attach my op-ed and submit the package. I pressed “return,” “monitor task” and “confirm.” The AI agent completed the tasks in a few minutes.
A few minutes is not speedy, and these were not complicated requests. But with each passing month the agents get faster and smarter. I used Operator by OpenAI, which is in research preview mode. Google’s Project Mariner, which is also a research prototype, can perform similar agentic tasks. Multiple companies now offer AI agents that will make phone calls for you — in your voice or another voice — and have a conversation with the person at the other end of the line based on your instructions.
Soon AI agents will perform more complex tasks and be widely available for the public to use. That raises a number of unresolved and significant concerns. Anthropic does safety testing of its models and publishes the results. One of its tests showed that the Claude Opus 4 model would potentially notify the press or regulators if it believed you were doing something egregiously immoral. Should an AI agent behave like a slavishly loyal employee, or a conscientious employee?
OpenAI publishes safety audits of its models. One audit showed the o3 model engaged in strategic deception, which was defined as behavior that intentionally pursues objectives misaligned with user or developer intent. A passive AI model that engages in strategic deception can be troubling, but it becomes dangerous if that model actively performs tasks in the real world autonomously. A rogue AI agent could empty your bank account, make and send fake incriminating videos of you to law enforcement, or disclose your personal information to the dark web.
Earlier this year, programming changes were made to xAI’s Grok model that caused it to insert false information about white genocide in South Africa in responses to unrelated user queries. This episode showed that large language models can reflect the biases of their creators. In a world of AI agents, we should also beware that creators of the agents could take control of them without your knowledge.
The U.S. government is far behind in grappling with the potential risks of powerful, advanced AI. At a minimum, we should mandate that companies deploying large language models at scale need to disclose the safety tests they performed and the results, as well as security measures embedded in the system.
The bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, on which I served, published a unanimous report last December with more than 80 recommendations. Congress should act on them. We did not discuss general purpose AI agents because they weren’t really a thing yet.
To address the unresolved and significant issues raised by AI, which will become magnified as AI agents proliferate, Congress should turn the task force into a House Select Committee. Such a specialized committee could put witnesses under oath, hold hearings in public and employ a dedicated staff to help tackle one of the most significant technological revolutions in history. AI moves quickly. If we act now, we can still catch up.
Ted Lieu, a Democrat, represents California’s 36th Congressional District.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
- The era of AI agents represents a seismic shift from passive information retrieval to autonomous task execution, where AI can independently perform real-world actions like scheduling appointments, booking travel, or submitting legal documents, as demonstrated by the author’s use of an AI agent to handle op-ed submission logistics.
- Unregulated AI agents pose significant dangers, including strategic deception (where AI pursues misaligned objectives), malicious actions like draining bank accounts or fabricating incriminating evidence, and propagation of creator biases, exemplified by xAI’s Grok inserting false claims about white genocide in unrelated responses.
- Current regulatory frameworks are critically inadequate, necessitating mandatory transparency through disclosed safety audits, embedded security protocols, and upgrading the Congressional AI Task Force to a Select Committee with subpoena power to address risks before agent proliferation becomes unmanageable.
Different views on the topic
- AI agents are poised to revolutionize business efficiency by autonomously orchestrating complex workflows—such as fraud detection, supply-chain optimization, and marketing campaigns—through advanced reasoning and real-time data synthesis, fundamentally transforming operations across finance, HR, and logistics[2][3][4].
- Technological advancements in 2025—including faster reasoning, expanded memory, and chain-of-thought training—enable agents to operate with unprecedented speed and accuracy, reducing human intervention while ensuring reliability in tasks like customer service resolution and payment processing[1][3].
- Enterprises already deploy “digital workforces” where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly, as seen in Salesforce’s Agentforce and Microsoft’s Copilot Vision Agents, which independently update CRM systems and execute cross-platform commands to enhance productivity without compromising safety[3][4].
Business
Tinder co-founder buys Walk of Fame property in Hollywood

Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen has invested in Hollywood with the $69-million purchase of retail property near the legendary TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
In a bet on the future value of local real estate, Mateen and his brother Tyler bought the Hollywood Galaxy shopping center and the historic Petersen Building next door.
The purchase comes at a time when most institutional investors such as pension funds have stopped acquiring property in Los Angeles. Values of many buildings in the region, including office skyscrapers, have fallen in recent years as the loss of tenants that started during the pandemic and other factors have driven down sale prices.
The Mateens, however, see this as an opportunity. They bought prominent properties in Beverly Hills and Westchester last year and are now stakeholders in Hollywood.
Justin Mateen is known for being a co-founder of popular dating app Tinder but is also a solo venture capitalist through his JAM Fund. He and his brother have a strategy to invest in their hometown of Los Angeles during a cooling commercial real estate market because they expect the region to bounce back in the years ahead.
“I’ve always been a contrarian investor,” he said. “Whether it’s startups, public markets or real estate, I take the long view and hold through cycles for forever. While others are pulling back from cities like L.A., we’re doubling down. Its resurgence feels inevitable.”
The Mateens plan to spruce up the Hollywood property sold by Federal Realty Investment Trust and seek tenants who want to interact with the millions of tourists who visit the blocks around the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue annually.
The three-story Hollywood Galaxy shopping center, which was completed in 1990, is nearly 80% leased to tenants including Target and LA Fitness. The remaining space could go to a high-profile business such as Nintendo or Lego that wants to create an interactive, immersive attraction for Hollywood visitors, Tyler Mateen said.
The brothers are looking for tenants “who benefit off heavy foot traffic and value a large format with visibility,” he said. That might also be a flagship store for a big brand like Nike, Adidas or Sephora.
The Petersen Building at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive, which is also part of the deal, was built in 1929 as the home of a Cadillac dealership. It’s now occupied by a Marshalls department store and La La Land souvenir shop.
Last year the Mateens and their partner Pouya Abdi bought Wilshire Rodeo Plaza, a five-story office building at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. They are in the process of signing new retail tenants for the building and planning a rooftop restaurant.
The Mateens also bought the HHLA entertainment center in Westchester near Playa Vista last year and are in the process of refurbishing it. Among its new tenants will be Meow Wolf, an immersive entertainment firm.
All three properties are in high-profile locations where it is difficult to develop new projects, Tyler Mateen said. “We want to own assets that you can’t build again and that the market can’t ignore.”
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