# Spotify Social Expansion and Meta VR Losses

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-01-30

## Transcript

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Music publisher Sue Anthropic for three billion dollars.
I'm Imran Shake and let's get your Daily Crunch for Friday started right now.
After launching a messaging feature last August, Spotify is now rolling out group chats.
Yeah, that's right.
The company announced this week that users can now share the podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks they're listening to with up to ten people.
Now you can only start a chat with someone you've previously shared content with.
For example, if you have a collaborative playlist with someone or have joined a jam or a blend together, you can start a conversation with them.
The move comes as Spotify continues to invest in making its streaming app more social.
Over the years, the company's gradually added social elements, including features such as comments on podcasts and the ability to follow someone and see what they listen to.
Spotify previously noted that users should continue sharing content outside the app as its messaging feature is meant to complement that.
Messages are encrypted at rest and in transit.
However, they are not protected by end-to-end encryption.
Earlier this month, Meta laid off 10% of the staff for Reality Labs, its virtual reality unit, reportedly cutting as many as 1,000 employees.
Well, now, in a development that seems directly related, the companies revealed that the unit lost many billions of dollars last year.
You see, on Wednesday, Meta's earnings report showed that its embattled virtual reality business had lost some $19.1 billion in 2025, which is slightly more than it lost in 2024.
That year, the losses hovered around 17.7 billion dollars.
In its fourth quarter, the unit posted a loss of $6.2 billion, the report shows.
Now, those losses stood against what the unit generated in sales, $955 million in Q4 and some $2.2 billion throughout 2025.
During the company's earnings call on Wednesday, The Zuck struck a tone of optimism for its company's VR team, while noting that losses in 2026 are expected to be very much the same.
When Meta announced a pivot toward the Metaverse in 2021, the move was regarded with a certain amount of skepticism, and during its first year of VR efforts, the company faced harsh criticism, even being referred to as an international laughing stock.
Well, nearly half a decade later, that skepticism hasn't exactly subsided.
As the VR business continues to lose money and Meta continues and aggressive pivot away from VR and toward AI, it's unclear what exactly will turn the ailing business around.
Last week CNBC reported that in addition to the layoffs, Meta had plans to shutter a number of its VR studios.
Another sign that the company's interest in virtual reality is waning.
The company also recently announced that it would be retiring its standalone workrooms app, which the company had pitched to office workers as a VR space that could be used to hold meetings.
A cohort of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, saying the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, song lyrics, and musical compositions.
The publisher said in a statement on Wednesday that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion, which would be one of the largest non-class action copyright cases filed in U.S.
history.
Now this lawsuit was filed by the same legal team from the Bartz v.
Anthropic case, in which a group of fiction and nonfiction authors similarly accused the AI company of using their copyrighted works to train products like Claude.
In that case, Judge William Altsup ruled that it is legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content.
However, he pointed out that it was not legal for Anthropic to acquire that content via piracy.
The Bart's V Anthropic case became a slap on the wrist worth 1.5 billion dollars for Anthropic, which impacted writers receiving about $3,000 per work for roughly $500,000 copyrighted works.
While $1.5 billion seems like a substantial sum, it's not exactly backbreaking for a company valued at $183 billion.
Originally, these music publishers had filed a lawsuit against Anthropic over its use of about 500 copyrighted works.
But through the discovery process in the Bartz case, the publishers say they found that Anthropic had also illegally downloaded thousands more.
The publisher tried to amend the original lawsuit to address the piracy issue, but the court denied that motion back in October, ruling they'd fail to investigate the piracy claims earlier.
That move prompted the publishers to instead file this separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amade and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI safety and research company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multi-billion dollar business empire has in fact, been built on piracy, the lawsuit says.
Anthropic did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.
And that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Aisha Malik, Amanda Silberling, Lucas Robek, and more awesome TechCrunch Journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow, folks.
Same Tag Time, same Crunch channel, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.
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