When music executive Anjula Acharia began launching superstar actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas into Hollywood in the early 2000s, her label partner Jimmy Iovine — the name behind pop sensations such as Eminem and Lady Gaga — told her she was 20 years too early to bring South Asian talent to the U.S.

Now, Acharia is the founder and CEO of 5 Junction, a joint label with Warner Music Group focused specifically on investing in South Asian artists in the U.S.

“That sounded crazy, to think we were 20 years too early, but now, 20 years later, with the explosion of people like Diljit Dosanjh and Karan Aujla … there’s all these South Asian acts that are coming here and really selling out, particularly in the live arena,” Acharia told CNBC.

The South Asian music market in the U.S. has remained largely untapped, but as music becomes more globalized, as with the success of K-pop and Latin acts, South Asian talent is making a case to investors as the next big business opportunity, Acharia said.

Global music revenues are reaching all-time highs, surpassing $30 billion in 2025, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Spotify said last year that streams of Indian artists in international markets grew more than 2,000% between 2019 and 2023, and nearly 50% of royalties from Indian artists on the platform in 2024 were from listeners outside India.

With South Asia’s growing population and diaspora, it’s set to be one of the fastest-growing segments within global music, according to Acharia.

“We’re in a different time, and I think digitally things travel just so much faster,” she said. “A lot of big hits were made with samples from Indian music, so it’s been in the zeitgeist for a long time — it’s just not been given a face.”

As more labels look to the subcontinent, Acharia said the business is currently in a stage of experimentation, figuring out what works and how the fan bases will evolve. Warner Music Group is the third-largest music label in the U.S., holding roughly 17% market share by distribution ownership as of the first quarter of 2026, according to Billboard.

“I think the business proposition is this global Indian fandom,” she said. “How do we galvanize this audience and this fandom, and how do we serve it?”

5 Junction represents top artists such as singer and songwriter Rhea Raj, who told CNBC she’s seeing South Asian music become more mainstream in the U.S.

“We’re seeing more artists at bigger festivals and at award shows, and I think the best of it’s yet to come,” Raj said.

Raj and her sister, Lara Raj, of the girl group Katseye, are two of many South Asian artists in the U.S. building out fan bases that span backgrounds and ethnicities.

Rhea Raj, who got her start on “American Idol” nearly a decade ago, said she believes now is the time that South Asian music is going to “explode” in the U.S., especially as 5 Junction continues to bring more artists to the main stages.

“South Asian music, it is so diverse, and within that, there are so many countries and regions and styles and things to break down and explore, and I just hope that as time goes on and we have more artists in the mainstream pop world, we’ll get to see more and more pieces of that,” she said.

Broadcom said Monday that it’s agreed to produce future versions of artificial intelligence chips for Google, and signed an expanded deal with Anthropic that will give the AI startup access to about 3.5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity drawing on Google’s AI processors.

Shares of Broadcom rose 3% in extended trading.

The disclosure in a securities filing underscores the surging demand for infrastructure that can run generative AI models. Anthropic’s popularity has soared this year, with its Claude app becoming the top free U.S. app listed in Apple’s App Store in February after a dispute between the company and the Pentagon became public.

Anthropic’s annualized revenue has exceeded $30 billion, up from around $9 billion at the end of last year, the startup said in a blog post. The company counts over 1,000 business clients spending more than $1 million annually, double the count as of two months ago.

“This groundbreaking partnership with Google and Broadcom is a continuation of our disciplined approach to scaling infrastructure: we are building the capacity necessary to serve the exponential growth we have seen in our customer base while also enabling Claude to define the frontier of AI development,” Anthropic’s finance chief, Krishna Rao, was quoted as saying in the blog post. Most of the new infrastructure will be located in the U.S., Anthropic said.

On an earnings call last month, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said that “for Anthropic, we are off to a very good start in 2026” in providing 1 gigawatt of compute from Google’s homegrown tensor processing units (TPUs). Broadcom helps Google make its TPUs.

“For 2027, this demand is expected to surge in excess of 3 gigawatts of compute,” he said.

In a note following the earnings call, analysts at Mizuho led by Vijay Rakesh estimated that Broadcom would pick up $21 billion in AI revenue from Anthropic in 2026 and $42 billion in 2027. The filing on Monday did not contain a dollar amount.

Meanwhile, Broadcom is also collaborating with Anthropic rival OpenAI on custom silicon for AI. Both model builders currently rely heavily on graphics processing units from Nvidia through cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. OpenAI has also committed to drawing on six gigawatts of AMD’s GPUs, with the first gigawatt set to come in the second half of this year.

WATCH: Final Trades: Broadcom, Spotify, Applovin and Uber

Streaming music apps have been nudging users into the artificial intelligence era with a limited track record of success. But AI-based recommendation tools from Apple, Amazon and pure-play streaming company Spotify are moving ahead, with Spotify’s latest approach to the future of personal music discovery leaning into the AI prompt in multiple formats. Experts say these tech investments may be critical to Spotify’s ability to build a moat around its business as the core input, music, becomes commoditized across the streaming apps.

A new ChatGPT integration rolled out recently by Spotify allows users to connect their accounts directly to OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot. The launch is good for OpenAI in its broader effort to turn ChatGPT into a platform for third-party apps that function inside conversations. For Spotify, it’s a bet that personalized music and podcast recommendations will be improved through the now-familiar format of chatting with an AI and letting it know what you want.  

Spotify users can ask for songs, artists, albums, playlists or podcast episodes by mood, genre or topic. Results surface inside ChatGPT and open in the Spotify app for playback. Users can interact with the recommendation, and offer specificity beyond what is possible with a classic “like/dislike” feedback option. 

According to a Spotify spokesperson, the prompts are “an opportunity to uncover new tracks or revisit old favorites, or extend a ChatGPT conversation with a soundtrack that fits the moment.” 

Spotify said the integration is opt-in and that users can disconnect at any time. It also said it will not share music or podcast content with OpenAI for training purposes — addressing industry concerns around AI and copyrighted material.

Spotify also recently rolled out its Prompted Playlist feature inside the streaming music app, a “vibey” feature that allows users to tap into a feeling or memory in order to build a custom mix.

The rival streaming services connected to the big tech players are exploring similar AI features.

Apple has been gradually layering AI into Apple Music. The “Playlist Playground” beta feature is closest to what Spotify is doing, as it also focuses on chat-based AI interaction that allows users to tweak recommendations via chat. Apple recently introduced AutoMix, which uses AI to analyze songs and automatically blend tracks by matching tempo and beats, eliminating silence between songs, adding crossfades and so on. The company has also rolled out machine-learning tools such as lyric translation and pronunciation features. 

Amazon Music has offered a prompt-based playlist feature called Maestro since mid-2024, which allows listeners to generate playlists using text descriptions or even emojis. It remains in beta testing rather than full release.

Spotify executives have repeatedly described AI as central to the platform’s subscriber stickiness strategy. On a recent earnings call, leadership told investors that improvements in AI-driven discovery are central to keeping users engaged with the platform. “Our investments into personalization and AI are paying off,” said Alex Norström, co-chief executive officer. “It means people are spending more days in a month with us and across more moments,” he said.

Spotify’s interactive iDJ feature, introduced in 2023, has roughly 90 million subscribers using it as of the most recent earnings report, with users racking up over four billion hours of time spent on the app. Norström said Prompted Playlists as “instantly taken off with power users.”

“If iDJ is the chat interface to Spotify, where you can talk casually, Prompted Playlists is the Deep Research mode of Spotify,” he said. “It lets you describe and set rules for your own personalized playlists – literally writing your own algorithm. … There’s nothing else like it.”

Music catalogs commoditized, AI generates millions of songs

According to analysts who cover Spotify, the executive hype about AI may need to be the reality sooner rather than later for the company. Even though there are cases of musicians pulling music from specific apps from time to time as negative headline issues appear — it happened to Spotify most recently due to its founder and former CEO Daniel Ek’s defense tech investments — competitors including Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music offer largely overlapping catalogs and increasingly sophisticated recommendation engines.

“The catalogs at Amazon, Apple and YouTube are similar — nearly identical songs — to Spotify, just like Bing and Edge are nearly identical to Google,” said Michael Pachter, senior advisor, digital media, sports & entertainment at Wedbush Securities, who covered the streaming industry as research analyst for many years. (Wedbush has never had a rating on Spotify shares specifically.)

While Google’s search business faces its own AI threat, Pachter said it is also the best model for Spotify to look to in terms of how to maintain a user edge. “Google managed to widen its moat by offering a number of features that make the service stickier, including remembering my credit card and password info. I can’t even conceive of switching from Google Search, and I think that is what Spotify is trying to establish,” he said.

Switching costs may be subtle, but they can be significant. Users build libraries, curate playlists and train algorithms over years. Each additional integration, whether with a car dashboard, a voice assistant or now an AI chatbot — Spotify says it now connects to over 2,000 device types — can further entrench the ecosystem.

“I expect this ChatGPT integration will be widely used by Spotify users and wildly successful,” Pachter said. “Others may try to do the same thing, but the switching costs grow every time you make the effort to build your playlists on Spotify, and that’s what they are counting on,” he said.

Apple Music and other third-party apps do offer tools to export playlists when subscribers seek to change music services.

Others on Wall Street are less convinced than Pachter, but did come away from the most recent quarter more positive on the Spotify AI story and less worried about the risks it faces from AI music creation tools disrupting platforms like its own. Spotify’s stock price has slumped in the past year by close to 20%, though the stock has performed very strongly since its 2018 IPO.

“Spotify addressed this concern head‑on, arguing that AI supports rather than undermines its strategic position. By leaning into personalization, product innovation, and scale advantages, Spotify appears positioned to use AI to strengthen its platform, though the pace of adoption and industry alignment will remain key variables,” wrote Bank of America’s research team, which rates the shares a buy, in a February note after the most recent earnings.

Gustav Söderström, Spotify co-CEO, said during that earnings call that building a music app that users can talk to, and that fully understands each listener, will shift listening “from a passive experience to an interactive one.”

Mark Mulligan, managing director and analyst at MIDiA Research, a research firm that tracks the music market, says AI is going to be integral to streaming music behavior, but he is less convinced that the distinction between interactive and passive being made by Spotify is the likely result.

“Streaming music consumption has bifurcated between passive and active,” Mulligan said. “But this does not mean that the audience has split in two — everyone has. Even the most active music listeners spend more than half their time listening passively.”

In fact, he says the broader trend is toward more passive consumption through curated playlists, and also via features such as artist radio stations and AI DJs. “The direction of travel is towards more passive listening,” Mulligan said. Agentic features may represent a compromise, “a middle ground between passive and active listening,” he said. “It allows the user to expend a small amount of ‘lean forward’ effort in return for a large amount of ‘lean back’ listening.”

Typing a detailed prompt into ChatGPT may feel active, but Mulligan says “the more that the algorithm learns about the listener’s behavior and tastes, the better its recommendations get and therefore the less the user has to lean in, thus shifting the needle even further towards passive listening.”

In this AI interface-first model of streaming, the underlying content is important, but matters less to what ultimately makes the user feel rewarded. For example, an ability to explicitly exclude artists or narrow by subgenre could make AI-assisted discovery feel more tailored than traditional algorithmic playlists. If a listener enjoys some 1980s rock bands, such as Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses, but dislikes others from the same era, it’s easier to filter. Spotify can normally predict that if you like A and most people who like A also like B, then you’ll probably like B, but that doesn’t necessarily represent how user tastes are expressed. “With GPT, I could say ‘no Def Leppard’ and my lists would be scrubbed of them,” Pachter said.

Any predictions about the impact of AI on music, as with any industry, remain educated guesswork. But it is already very clear that AI is having an impact on the idea of a music catalog itself. According to a recent Rothschild & Co Redburn report, text-to-music platforms like Suno are reportedly generating around seven million songs per day, roughly equivalent to Spotify’s entire pre-AI catalogue every fortnight. “This is a deluge,” its analyst Ed Vyvyan stated.

Söderström hinted that it’s the dataset yet to come and not the deep tracks already in the stack that matter most to the future. “We are building a dataset that never existed,” he said on the recent earnings call. “We have had the song-to-song dataset, but no one had the language-to-song dataset. … You may think it is a canonical dataset, meaning there is a factual answer to, for example, what is workout music? There is no factual answer to what is workout music. … on average, for an American, it is usually hip hop. For a European, it is usually EDM. For many Scandinavians, it is something like heavy metal or even death metal. Then again, for a lot of Americans, millions at least, it is also death metal.”

“You cannot just have an LLM commoditize it as a fact, the way you can commoditize Wikipedia,” he said. “You actually need to have many, many hundreds of millions of listeners across the world’s markets constantly telling you what it means for that specific person.”

Apple on Monday announced that it will bring a new integrated video podcast experience to Apple Podcasts this spring.

The move comes as video viewership continues to reshape podcasting. About 37% of people over age 12 watch video podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research.

The update brings Apple Podcasts more in-line with its competitors Spotify, YouTube and now Netflix, which have increasingly leaned into video podcasting.

“Twenty years ago, Apple helped take podcasting mainstream by adding podcasts to iTunes, and more than a decade ago, we introduced the dedicated Apple Podcasts app,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, in a statement. “By bringing a category-leading video experience to Apple Podcasts, we’re putting creators in full control of their content and how they build their businesses, while making it easier than ever for audiences to listen to or watch podcasts.”

Within the Apple Podcasts app, users will be able to switch seamlessly between watching and listening to shows from the same feed. They can also use picture-in-picture mode and download video episodes for offline viewing.

While Apple Podcasts has supported video through RSS since 2005, those feeds were kept separate from audio versions of the same show. The new update introduces support for HLS, or HTTP Live Streaming, a streaming protocol developed by Apple that enables adaptive video playback and greater controls within the app.

The new HLS format also introduces dynamic video ad insertion. Creators who distribute through participating hosting providers and ad networks will be able to insert video ads, including host-read spots, into episodes.

Apple said it will not charge creators or hosting providers to distribute content. However, it will charge participating ad networks an impression-based fee for delivering dynamic video ads through HLS.

These launch podcast hosting partners include Acast, Amazon-owned ART19, Triton’s Omny Studio and SiriusXM who will all be supporting HLS video.

The announcement comes as competitors continue investing in podcast video. YouTube said last year it has more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content on its platform. Spotify has also expanded its video podcast offerings and said it paid more than $100 million to podcasters in the first quarter of last year.

Netflix has also entered the video podcast space. The streaming platform inked a deal with Spotify last year to bring video podcasts to Netflix and has begun investing in original video podcast programming, including “The Pete Davidson Show,” which launched in January.

Apple does not break out revenue specifically for Apple Podcasts, but its Services segment, which includes digital content and subscription businesses, generated $30 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter.

In January, the company acquired Israeli artificial intelligence startup Q.ai for an undisclosed amount. The company has not released details of the acquisition, though Q.ai’s website indicated it was working on audio-focused AI tools.

Spotify‘s stock popped 15% as the music streaming platform added more users and bolstered features in newer markets.

Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates.

• Earnings per share: 4.43 euros vs 2.74 euros expected
• Revenue: 4.53 billion euros vs 4.52 billion euros expected

Revenue in the fourth quarter rose 7% year over year.

The Swedish company said monthly active users jumped 11% from a year ago to 751 million, surpassing the 744.7 million expected by analysts polled by FactSet. Paid subscribers surged 10% year over year to 290 million.

Spotify attributed strong user additions to growth in Latin America, Europe and the rest of the world and improvements to its mobile free tier. Co-CEO Alex Norström said the company recorded the most users ever added during a quarter.

The streamer’s 476 million ad-supported user numbers also beat estimates, topping the 468.9 million expected by StreetAccount.

The company also launched audiobooks in new markets and rolled out music videos for premium users, along with more artificial intelligence tools in the fourth quarter.

This month, Spotify also hiked prices for Premium users in the U.S., Estonia and Latvia. The company previously raised U.S. subscription prices in 2024 and 2023.

The music platform said 2025’s “Spotify Wrapped,” which breaks down user listening hours and most popular songs at the end of the year, was its most successful ever. Over 300 million users interacted with the feature, which collected more than 630 million shares on social media, Spotify said.

Net income grew to 1.17 billion euros ($1.39 billion), or 4.43 euros per share, from 367 million euros, or 1.76 euros per share, in the year-ago period.

Looking ahead, Spotify expects monthly active users to grow by 8 million this quarter to 759 million, surpassing a 752.4 million estimate from FactSet. Total premium subscribers are forecast to hit 293 million.

Spotify projects revenue to total 4.5 billion euros, with a 670 basis point headwind year over year from foreign exchange rates. That came up short of a 4.58 billion euros estimate.

More than 900 Google workers have signed an open letter condemning recent actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), urging the tech giant to disclose its dealings with the agencies and divest from them.

The letter, citing recent ICE killings of Keith Porter, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti, said that the employees are “appalled by the violence” and “horrified” by Google’s part in it.

“Google is powering this campaign of surveillance, violence, and repression,” the letter reads.

It goes on to cite that Google Cloud is aiding CBP surveillance and powering Palantir’s ImmigrationOS system, which is used by ICE. The letter states that Google’s generative artificial intelligence is used by CBP and that the Google Play Store has blocked ICE tracking apps.

The letter also quotes a social media post by Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean from early January, who wrote, “We all bear a collective responsibility to speak up and not be silent when we see things like the events of the last week.”

“We are vehemently opposed to Google’s partnerships with DHS, CBP, and ICE,” the employees wrote. “We consider it our leadership’s ethical and policy-bound responsibility to disclose all contracts and collaboration with CBP and ICE, and to divest from these partnerships.”

The letter calls on Google to acknowledge the danger that workers face from ICE, host an emergency internal Q&A on the company’s DHS and military contracts, implement safety measures to protect workers — such as flexible work-from-home policies and immigration support — and reveal its ties with the government agencies to help all involved determine where the company will draw a line.

“As workers of conscience, we demand that our leadership end our backslide into contracting for governments enacting violence against civilians,” the letter reads. “Google is now a prominent node in a shameful lineage of private companies profiting from violent state repression. We must use this moment to come together as a Googler community and demand an end to this disgraceful use of our labor.”

Google did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

The letter comes as employees place mounting pressure on tech CEOs to speak out against ICE. Just two weeks prior, employees representing Amazon, Spotify, Meta and more wrote a similar letter demanding ICE “out of our cities.”