3 Months Free Spotify Premium; Musk v Apple; Create With Alexa for Kids; Cyber Monday Sets Record

Everyone likes a freebie, and here’s one from Spotify for the holidays. Bgr.com reports that you can get 3 months of Spotify Premium if you sign up for the Individual Premium Plan before the end of the year. After that, it will automatically renew for $9.99 a month unless you cancel. In addition to that…if you ever signed up for Spotify Premium before, but canceled before October 28 of this year, you can sign up again, and get 3 months for the price of one, $9.99. As with the other deal, it renews for the $9.99 a month after the third month. If you’ve been wanting ad free Spotify, here’s your chance.

It’s been all over the news, but Elon Musk is taking on…of all firms…Apple…the richest company on earth. He is accusing them of being against free speech by ditching advertising on Twitter. Apple had previously been one of the platform’s major advertisers. According to Media Matters, Twitter has lost half its top 100 advertisers since Musk started changing things. Those firms spent some $750 million with Twitter in 2022 up to that point. Musk is also claiming Apple has threatened to take Twitter off the App Store due to the lack of moderation now. I think Matt Gertz summed things up pretty well in this Tweet: ‘I dunno if you’re going to try to make an example of one of your advertisers in an attempt to keep others from dropping you maybe shouldn’t start with the richest company on the planet which can also killshot your business?’

As we have reported before, Amazon is losing money with Alexa devices. Now, they’ve come up with a way to try to hook kids in to using them more, to pump things up. Engadget.com says they are rolling out ‘Create With Alexa’ on Echo Show devices. The system uses AI to let kids guide the creation of animated stories using kid-friendly prompts. Note that it works whether the device is in Amazon Kids mode or not. There are only 3 themes available at start: space exploration, underwater, and enchanted forest. The child can pick the scene, pick the hero, then color scheme, etc. When it’s done, they can watch the story, which is saved so your kid can show it to you again and again ad nauseam. 

Black Friday was up this year, and now the data is in, and Cyber Monday was up even more. Driven by deep discounts, Cyber Monday hauled in $11.3 billion in online sales, according to Adobe Analytics. That was up 5.8% over the day last year. Cyber Monday continues to be the biggest day of the Thanksgiving weekend. This year, Thanksgiving Day had $5.29 billion in sales, and Black Friday $9.12 billion….both up from last year. 

I’m Clark Reid, and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.