FinTech news in Spotify category

The announcement of the NFT-gated playlists pilot comes just before Spotify is set to hold its Stream On event on March 8

In a post on the Shopify Engineering blog, Dion Almaer, VP of engineering at Shopify, said that the purchase of Remix will benefit both Shopify developers and merchants by bringing improvements to Hydrogen. Not coincidentally, Shopify originally used React Router to architect Hydrogen, the company’s frontend web development framework for building custom Shopify storefronts Remix, a startup developing an open source web framework similar to Next.js, has been acquired by Shopify, the companies announced in a joint statement today. Compatible with public cloud environments including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers, one of Remix’s key features is prefetching — the framework can prefetch elements of a webpage in parallel, including buttons and forms, before a user clicks on a link to minimize page loading.

Michael Mignano has joined the consumer practice of the sprawling venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, after previously co-founding the podcasting platform Anchor and then leading Spotify talk audio business after the streaming giant acquired Anchor in 2019 for more than $150 million. Former New York Times reporter Lydia Polgreen, who was helping to run the podcast studio Gimlet, which Spotify bought for a reported $230 million in February 2019, meanwhile left the company in April to rejoin the Times. Interestingly, Mignano joins a firm that did not invest in Anchor, though he says in a new Medium post that he first met Lightspeed when he was out fundraising for his then-nascent startup. It’s a matter of money, largely, says Mignano, writing that podcast revenues are expected to exceed $2 billion this year, while YouTube generated nearly $29 billion in video ad revenue last year alone.

In October, the company partnered with Shopify to allow artists on its service to connect their Spotify profiles with their Shopify stores, allowing them to market their merchandise directly to fans through the Spotify app.

Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand.