# Spotify Memberships and Meta Muse AI Growth

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-10-21

## Transcript

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Meta's Muse hits 10 million US downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other apps.
I'm Imran Shaikh, and your Daily Crunch for Wednesday, featuring three big tech headlines, starts right now.
On Tuesday, Spotify launched Paid Memberships, a new way for podcasters to make money from their biggest fans beyond paywalled bonus episodes.
You see, creators can decide which perks to offer listeners, which could be bonus audio or video, fewer ads, early access to shows, or some combination thereof.
Now, the streaming service first previewed the idea at its investor day in May, where it also introduced AI capabilities that let listeners ask questions about what they're listening to or watching and debuted new tools for managing creator sponsorships.
As the company explained at the time, memberships would help to create a natural path to go deeper, unlocking new and exclusive experiences for fans and new revenue opportunities for creators.
The feature is now rolling out to 34 markets globally, including the U.S.
The launch is the latest example of Spotify's effort to make its platform more attractive to podcast creators, particularly as it moves further into the video space to compete with good old YouTube.
Though podcasters have long been able to monetize through ads, the new memberships could entice more fans to support creators by offering more than just an occasional bonus episode.
Creators keep 90% of the membership revenue and can package their benefits across multiple tiers and pricing options.
to appeal to fans at different levels of commitment.
Now, to qualify, podcasters must host their shows on Spotify for creators or megaphone, have at least 100 consumption hours, 100 listeners or viewers, and at least three published episodes.
A handful of shows will offer memberships at launch, including the Adam Friedland Show, Making Sense with Sam Harris, Sean Ryan Show, The Sculpt Society, Two Hot Takes, as well as YMH Studios, which is bringing memberships to 12 shows across its network.
Memberships join other Spotify monetization tools, including advertising and Spotify partner program, as well as features that help creators grow their audience like promotions, free trials and analytics.
Soon, Spotify says, creators will be able to offer fans membership badges and welcome clips as well.
Over the last few weeks, personal assistants like Instinct, Foe and Muse have enabled users to call businesses for customer support and appointment booking.
Well, following this trend, Yelp is adding the ability for its app users to get a voice agent to call a restaurant to check wait times.
The new feature, Check For Me, will show up on restaurant pages in the app where users can enter their party size and phone number.
The AI agent then calls on behalf of the user to check wait times and texts them the result to decide if they want to go to that particular restaurant.
Last year, Yelp debuted its voice solution for restaurants and service providers.
With this new feature, the Discovery platform is fulfilling the consumer side of the equation, though.
There is a possibility that a user's agent will talk to the restaurant's agent, and agent-to-agent communication might break down the conversation.
The company is also updating its Yelp AI assistant that helps users discover restaurants and services.
With the new OpenTable integration, users can easily book a restaurant without leaving the app.
Yelp is adding better personalization to its assistant by having it remember preferences that you might have mentioned in previous chats.
Plus, you can access your chat history from the past 30 days in the app, with full history available soon.
Users can ask the chatbot to set custom reminders, such as sending suggestions for weekend activities every Friday.
The company's also letting users build their own lists, starting with two been here and want to go lists.
You can filter your lists by location, category, and cuisine, reorder, add notes to items, and share them with others.
Next month, the company will start showing weekly personalized recommendations based on your saved items and rankings.
Yelp's also working on converting collections to lists and giving the lists tab a new look, rolling out later in the year along with a maps view.
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Meta's AI companion Muse is now one of only a dozen mobile apps to have reached 10 million U.S.
downloads in its first 40 days on the market.
According to new data from market intelligence provider SensorTower, Muse has seen 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of which were in the United States.
Only 11 other apps to date have reached this type of post-launch milestone, said SensorTower senior insights analyst Cara Lee.
The most recent of these was Meta's Threads, all the way back in July 2023.
Other apps that saw this kind of scale were largely mobile games, Lee noted.
Meta's success is tied to the company's ability to scale its new apps by marketing them across its other services, which it has done with both Threads and Muse.
And Meta is heavily investing in advertising to drive new users to Muse.
Per Sensor Towers data, Meta has allocated 39% of its total advertising spend to market Muse in October, up from 23% last month.
In addition, Muse now ranks as the 21st largest brand in the U.S.
by advertising impressions this month, up from 73rd in September.
Muse also hit another milestone that demonstrates active engagement with the AI app.
Its daily active users reach...
2.5 million for the first time on October 16th, a 15% week-over-week increase.
Meta's latest AI app, which can handle various tasks on users' behalf, has seen breakout success since its debut.
It shot up to number one on the App Store and, at one point, even outpaced some of the metrics ChatGPT saw following its launch.
Its latest milestone sees it topping its rivals again, as ChatGPT saw 3.7 million US downloads in its first 40 days on the market.
Grok and Claude, well, they saw only 500,000 and 200,000 U.S.
downloads, respectively, in their first 40 days.
Since launching, Muse has retained its number one rank on the U.S.
App Store for all days except October 19th, when streaming app Kik briefly beat it out.
It has since reclaimed the top spot as of Tuesday.
Muse has also been number one on Google Play over the past 30 days.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Ivan Mehta, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
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