All it takes is two to three weddings to break even
Two to three weddings. That’s all it takes for entrepreneurs Edmund Teo from Octopus Reels and Jessica Tay from Leave Your Message to fully recoup their startup costs—and everything after is profit.
Their business? Renting out digital guestbooks that capture audio and video messages from wedding guests. As more couples seek personalised, interactive experiences, this niche service is quickly gaining popularity and turning into a profitable opportunity.
Set up is simple, only requires two to three people, and the equipment is reusable, making margins compelling with limited costs.
Vulcan Post speaks with the two founders to uncover what it takes to run a digital guestbook business—and just how lucrative it can be.
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What’s driving couples to ditch traditional guestbooks
Digital guestbooks that record audio (left) and video (right) have emerged in popularity in recent years./ Image Credit: Leave Your Message/ Octopus Reels
In Singapore, couples are increasingly moving away from traditional guestbooks because digital formats offer something far more engaging and memorable.
While handwritten guestbooks are sentimental, they are often stored away and rarely revisited. More often than not, only a few pages are filled while the rest remain blank.
Audio and video recordings, on the other hand, capture the tone, laughter, and emotions behind each message, allowing couples to relive those moments for years to come.
We have had couples share how moved they were when revisiting their recordings.
Edmund Teo, founder of Octopus Reels
(Left): Traditional physical guestbooks that guests are invited to write in; (Right): Recorded video from a digital video guestbook./ Image Credit: Artisan Prints, Octopus Reels
Jessica added that digital guestbooks make memories feel “more alive” by preserving expressions, voices, and interactions that a page of writing cannot convey.
She also noted that the rise of digital guestbooks connects to broader cultural currents. “In recent years, there has been a strong comeback of nostalgia, like the rise of digital cameras and Y2K aesthetics, where people are drawn to things that feel a bit more raw and authentic.”
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Typically, digital guestbooks use a vintage telephone setup. Guests pick up the handset to hear a short, pre-recorded message from the couple, then record their own message after a tone. The retro telephone design, complete with rotary dials or classic handsets, adds a memorable touch.
Weddings, being highly emotional occasions, naturally attract formats that combine familiar, nostalgic elements.
At the same time, the industry itself also offers fertile ground for niche services like digital guestbooks. In 2024, the Singapore wedding market was valued at US$153.22 million (S$196.57 million), and is projected to reach US$292.38 million (S$375.11 million) by 2033, growing at an annual rate of 7.46%.
Both founders of Octopus Reels and Leave Your Message now run their businesses full-time, though Jessica initially started hers as a side hustle before leaving her full-time job as demand grew.
At first glance, the business seems simple and low-cost.
Similar digital video guestbook equipment sells for around S$533 on Amazon.sg, while each accordion-style column stand—typically used to hold and elevate the vintage telephone handsets—costs between S$72 and S$101. That totals to S$797 for a digital guestbook telephone setup with three cylindrical columns of varying heights.
With rates starting at S$295 for six hours for a basic digital guestbook setup by Octopus Reels and S$380 for two hours by Leave Your Message, both businesses can recoup their initial setup costs in just three bookings, making them highly lucrative ventures.
However, running the business goes beyond purchasing equipment. Set up, logistics, and manpower are all crucial to delivering a smooth and memorable guest experience. There are also additional technical support and post-production editing required to transform raw footage into polished keepsakes.
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Edmund shared that the average breakdown of costs for each setup, excluding equipment, is as follows:
Category
Cost
Manpower
S$80-S$200 for two to three people, depending on theme and requirements.
Transport and logistics
S$30-S$120. More decor-intensive setups require larger vehicles.
Post-production
S$60 to S$300, depending on the number of messages and the amount of footage to process.
Storage and maintenance costs
Low, but expected to increase with more props and larger volumes of data as they are handled over time.
Advertising
S$70 per booking through Meta, plus ~3% processing fee of S$2.10.
Minus off all these costs, the overall profit margin for Octopus Reels is 20–30% for simpler setups, and tends to increase with larger or customised events, making the business still highly attractive.
Leave Your Message, however, declined to disclose exact figures, with Jessica explaining that these are “commercially sensitive for the business.” She did note, though, that there are “less obvious costs,” including seasonal fluctuations in bookings and downtime between events.
“While this can be a profitable business under the right conditions, there is also a fair amount of operational work behind the scenes that people may not immediately see,” she added.
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Standing out in an increasingly crowded market
(Left): Leave Your Message’s London Phone Booth; (Right): Octopus Reels’ setup for a Chinese New Year event./ Image Credit: Leave Your Message/ Octopus Reels
Demand is booming for these businesses’ offerings.
Octopus Reels currently runs 10 to 12 events every weekend, and in 2025, it supported 208 events across 98 venues, with demand peaking in Oct when the company managed up to eight events in a single day. Meanwhile, Leave Your Message has participated in over 400 events since 2023.
While weddings remain the core revenue driver, both companies have expanded into adjacent markets.
Octopus Reels has supported corporate events, birthday celebrations, and community initiatives, including a meaningful project with Sport Singapore for individuals with dementia.
Similarly, Leave Your Message has recorded appreciation messages at company award ceremonies and participated in large-scale activations like the National Day NTUC Youth initiative, where messages collected across institutions were showcased during the National Day Parade.
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This diversification reduces reliance on wedding seasonality for sales on digital guestbooks—a critical business strategy in an industry where demand fluctuates throughout the year.
(Left): Today, Octopus Reels also offers interactive wedding experiences such as low-fog effects; (Right): For guests who want to leave a message virtually or are unable to attend in person, Leave Your Message provides QR codes at events to submit videos./ Image Credit: Octopus Reels/ Leave Your Message
As competition intensifies with more businesses offering similar services, differentiation becomes especially important.
Hence, both companies have also diversified beyond their core guestbook services. Octopus Reels now offers interactive photo gallery installations, creating “mini exhibitions” of couples’ memories and low-lying fog effects for “walking on clouds” march-ins. They are also partnering with a local coffee cart vendor to bring Vietnamese coffee experiences into wedding spaces.
Jessica’s company, on the other hand, has expanded its digital guestbook concept with a virtual video option, where guests scan QR codes to record messages on their mobile phones. This extends the experience to overseas guests who cannot attend physically.
Will digital guestbooks stay?
Edmund considers video guestbooks an “early-stage trend,” with the potential to become a standard feature at weddings.
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But as with any trend, it can flare up quickly—and fade just as fast. Despite this, Jessica is confident it will endure, at least in terms of its core intent.
“The format may continue to evolve, but the intention behind it, capturing meaningful messages from loved ones, will always be relevant.”
Ultimately, the emotional resonance is a key driver of the business model.
Edmund described parents leaving messages for newlyweds: “In many Asian families, emotions are not always expressed openly. The guestbook creates a space for parents to share heartfelt messages they might not say in person.”
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For entrepreneurs entering this space, the playbook is clear: source reliable equipment, master post-production workflows, build vendor relationships for referrals, and differentiate through unique experiential offerings.
The wedding and events industries reward specialists who can deliver reliability and emotional impact.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed an alkaline all-iron flow battery capable of more than 6,000 charge-discharge cycles without measurable capacity decay, according to a paper published in Advanced Energy Materials. The team estimates that performance is equivalent to around 16 years of daily use. Read Entire Article Source link
Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.
Today’s Connections: Sports Edition features a mix of difficulty. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.
Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.
Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.
Yellow group hint: Steel City sports.
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Green group hint: Baseball info.
Blue group hint: She shoots, she scores!
Purple group hint: Giddy up!
Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson makes a waving gesture while commenting on millionaires threatening to leave Washington state during her appearance at Seattle University earlier this month. (Screenshot via YouTube / Seattle Channel)
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is being greeted with a bit of backlash over a recent “goodbye.”
During a conversation earlier this month at Seattle University, Wilson offered her take on the supposed threats of millionaires in Washington state who say tax policy will drive them to leave.
“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, bye,” Wilson said while offering a wave before laughing amid cheers from the crowd. (See the exchange at 39:09 in video below.)
The comments, which resurfaced online this week, have drawn criticism from some in Seattle’s tech community, who see them as emblematic of a broader hostility toward business in the region.
Wilson was joined by King County Executive Girmay Zahilay for an April 14 conversation with moderators about how their progressive approaches to politics and policies shape the future of the Puget Sound region. Both were elected in November.
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The mayor was asked whether she thought progressive taxes — like the state’s recently passed 9.9% tax applied to taxable, personal annual income that exceeds $1 million — are an “easy and promising solution.”
“As someone who has been fighting for progressive taxes for a very long time, I can tell you they are not easy,” Wilson said, adding that she was “excited” to see the so-called millionaires tax pass the state Legislature.
Wilson acknowledged that Washington’s tax structure remains heavily regressive overall, and said her office is actively exploring progressive taxation options available to the city. While she noted that Seattle has more local taxing flexibility than the county, she cautioned that Seattle can’t stray too far from its neighbors — pointing to Bellevue as an example — without risking its competitiveness as a place to do business.
GeekWire reached out to the mayor’s office for comment and we’ll update if we hear back.
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The debate over progressive taxation in Washington state has been building for months, with the tech community largely — though not uniformly — alarmed by what it sees as a hostile policy environment.
When the millionaires tax was still a proposal, a coalition of AI researchers, founders, and investors wrote to Gov. Bob Ferguson urging him to pause both the income tax and a proposed expansion of the capital gains tax, warning that the measures would push top talent and future startups out of the region.
Earlier, some startup leaders called a related capital gains proposal targeting startup equity an “extinction-level event,” with founders testifying in Olympia against the bill. The measure failed to pass.
Prominent voices like Microsoft President Brad Smith have been pointed in their criticism, warning that Washington risks taking its tech sector for granted and urging lawmakers to focus on economic development — not just revenue extraction.
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Wilson’s wave and “bye” are drawing fresh scrutiny among some in Seattle’s tech community.
“Seattle is so f**ked,” longtime Seattle investor and entrepreneur Chris DeVore wrote on LinkedIn Friday. “When the person running the city doesn’t seem to understand that all jobs and tax revenue come from private employers, and driving employers away permanently hollows out her capacity to pay for her social programs, it’s clear that we’re in for a rough decade, if not a permanent decline.”
In an opinion piece earlier this month for GeekWire, DeVore expressed his frustration with Democrats at both the state and national level today who he said are turning capitalism into the enemy, “pursuing confiscatory tax policies that villainize entrepreneurial wealth.”
Charles Fitzgerald, another Seattle-area investor, warned earlier this year on GeekWire about the danger of Seattle becoming “the next Cleveland,” stating that the city’s success could unravel quickly in the wake of a deteriorating business environment.
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On his Platformonomics blog on Friday, Fitzgerald posted several items — including a New York Post story about Wilson’s comments — under the “Don’t be Cleveland” header. Others included a report citing record office vacancy rates in Seattle, a downgrading of the state’s credit rating, and more.
Not everyone in the tech community shares the alarm. Jacob Colker, managing director at the AI2 Incubator, pushed back earlier this year on what he called a “breathless narrative” that Seattle is one tax bill away from collapse, arguing that a few points of additional taxation don’t outweigh the region’s deep bench of AI talent, investment capital, and quality of life.
“Should we be thoughtful about tax policy? Heck yeah,” Colker wrote. “But the breathless narrative that Seattle is one bill from collapse is not serious analysis.”
While Wilson’s physical goodbye wave ignited some backlash, a comment on DeVore’s LinkedIn post from Seattle entrepreneur and investor Diego Oppenheimer summed up some of the frustration with a single, wordless emoji comment — the facepalm.
For years, Apple has been rumored to be bringing native touch functionality to the Mac. A new display gives us an early look at what that may be like, for better and worse.
Recently, I got an early look at the Aspekt Touch, a new monitor from Alogic. This isn’t the first touchscreen monitor from the brand, but the tilt functionality combined with macOS Tahoe gives early impressions about how a first-party solution could be implemented.
Feel free to check out Mike’s initial hands-on of the Aspekt Touch, but here’s the high-level. It’s a 32-inch 4K display that is also able to house a Mac mini in the bottom of the stand, and it can tilt nearly flat to be used more comfortably as a touchscreen.
A skeptic, early
I’m conflicted about the idea of a touchscreen Mac. I’ve been a detractor for ages, agreeing with Apple’s official stance that the iPad is the best touchscreen computer.
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Aspekt Touch tilted back
By and large, I haven’t felt the need for a touch interface on my Mac. Recently, though, that’s started to change.
I’ve gone from using my iPad and the Magic Keyboard over to my Mac and inadvertently kept poking at the display. If the iPad can get trackpad functionality, why can’t we get supplemental touch functionality on the Mac?
After a lot of thought, I think what matters is the approach. Based on current rumors, that approach could be what sets it apart.
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Over on iPad, it is designed as touch first, with cursor support added for certain users when it makes sense. On the Mac, it will still be cursor first, with touch added as a supplemental interaction method.
Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro
During Windows’ push toward touch-first design, the UI was watered down to accommodate it. The result was a hodgepodge interface that felt smashed together, inconsistent, and didn’t seem to work well.
As long as macOS remains macOS, I think there could be some potential here, and it has been fun to explore with the Aspekt Touch.
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Aspekt Touch monitor brings touch to macOS, with caveats
Alogic provides a simple driver package to add touch support to the Mac. You download the installer and grant it a few permissions, and you’re ready to go.
Alogic’s software to enable and customize the touch controls
Once done, I could just start tapping away on the large 32-inch screen. I could scroll through Safari, zoom by pinching in and out, and even initiate a right-click.
Using the stylus was a solid experience, too. Any capacitive stylus will work, but Alogic has its own with some extra features.
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Hover support on the Alogic stylus
The stylus supports hover effects, so as I work in Affinity, I can see tooltips appear over the different tools. When you flip the stylus around, you can use the other side as an eraser to erase what you’ve drawn.
The stylus supports varying degrees of pressure, and I didn’t seem to have any issues with palm rejection.
Zoom in and out by pinching in Safari
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When you dig into the Alogic app, you can fine-tune your experience. You can customize the touch effects on a per-app basis to get very granular in how you interact with macOS.
Overall, it’s a solid experience for being added with a third-party plugin. However, a native experience would need to go even further.
Liquid Glass arrives in macOS Tahoe
The problem with the non-native experience is that it’s cobbled together piecemeal from different existing macOS features. There’s no native touch layer that works universally, and many UI elements aren’t designed for touch.
The magnifier effect
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For example, when using the zoom feature, many times it just initiates the magnifier from the accessibility settings. This gets the job done, sure, but not in the way I expected.
I also struggled tapping certain elements, like when editing in Affinity or Pixelmator. The sheer number and size of items made it hard to tap the exact one, especially if I was trying to move with any degree of urgency.
Liquid Glass is easy to touch
My biggest takeaway was how great Liquid Glass was. The UI elements that were skinned with Liquid Glass were easier to tap and felt more natural.
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This offers an early glimpse of how touch functionality might be implemented. Liquid Glass may be divisive, but it suggests a more consistent cross-platform experience, and that includes touch support.
I’d also love to see native support for Apple Pencil. I don’t draw, but I do edit a lot of photos, and Apple Pencil is great for getting that done on iPad.
The Alogic stylus still has lag when drawing or writing
The Alogic stylus has noticeable lag, which is hardly ideal. I’d like to think that an Apple first-party implementation wouldn’t have that issue, just as it doesn’t on iPad.
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Other Apple Pencil features could also debut, like the squeeze gesture to open up a tool palette or maybe something specific for Mac. I’d love it if I could squeeze the Apple Pencil Pro and see a collection of my favorite shortcuts to quickly run.
Probably not a 2026 experience
My biggest concern is that if touch is added, it needs to complement macOS. It shouldn’t try to replace what’s already there.
At the moment, it appears the first touchscreen Mac will be the redesigned M6 OLED MacBook Pro. Clearly, a keyboard and trackpad will be front and center to that experience.
Touching macOS Tahoe
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That means we won’t be getting an iPad form factor running macOS, at least any time soon. I think that’s a good thing, but opinions vary amongst the AppleInsider staff, given that the Magic Keyboard with trackpad exists.
We’ll likely have to wait a bit longer to see though, as recent rumors say Apple’s redesigned MacBook Pro, first slated for the end of 2026, is now likely going to ship in early 2027. This isn’t because of developmental reasons, but rather component shortages that are plaguing the industry.
I’m still a bit skeptical here on whether macOS needs touch support or not. After using it for the last couple of weeks, I’m at least leaning towards more “for” than “against” at the moment.
Maybe we’ll get a clearer picture come WWDC with the preview of macOS 27. We’ll find out soon.
Operating profit in semiconductors climbed to 53.7 trillion won ($36.15 billion) for the January – March period, up sharply from 1.1 trillion won a year earlier. The figure accounted for roughly 94% of Samsung’s total operating profit of 57.2 trillion won. Revenue rose 69% year over year to 133.9 trillion won. Read Entire Article Source link
Musely, a direct-to-consumer telemedicine platform, has secured over $360 million in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
The company specializes in compounded treatments for skin, hair, and menopause care. Musely co-founder and CEO Jack Jia told TechCrunch that when CVF investors reached out to him last year, he wasn’t looking to raise capital.
That’s because Musely, which was founded in 2014 as a wellness community before pivoting to prescription skincare in 2019, has been cash flow positive for years, he said. Jia didn’t want to reduce his ownership in the company by selling off a chunk of it to VCs. They frequently approached him about a potential round and he consistently turned them down, he said.
But unlike traditional venture capital, CVF wasn’t looking to take an equity stake, nor was it offering a loan that would carry interest rate charges. Instead, CVF’s alternative financing is similar to a tiny revenue-share agreement: Companies with predictable revenue streams borrow capital, and then repay the funds along with a fixed, capped percentage of revenue it generates from the use of General Catalyst’s fund.
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Although Jia was initially skeptical, he quickly realized CVF’s terms were more favorable than a standard bank loan and far less costly than a dilutive equity round.
“When I mathematically modeled it, I found this absolutely compelling,” he said.
While Musely has been growing its revenue on average 50% year-over-year and has served over 1.2 million patients, acquiring new customers for DTC brands like Musely can be very costly, Jia explained. “When you become a billion-dollar revenue company, you need another billion in order to grow to the next billion,” he said. “That’s why most of the DTC companies, if you look at the capital burn, it is huge.”
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San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026
The funding from CVF solves this problem, providing Musely with a capital war chest to support its customer growth. The funding will support sales, marketing, and other customer acquisition efforts.
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Musely joins a CVF portfolio that includes Grammarly, Lemonade, and Ro. The fund maintains its own distinct limited partners, and the capital it invests was not included in General Catalyst’s last $8 billion fundraise.
Unlike many of its peers, Musely has been remarkably capital-efficient. After raising $20 million from DCM and other investors in 2014, the company has not raised a single dollar of equity capital since, according to Jia. Musely allows patients to access prescription products through asynchronous consultations with board-certified dermatologists and OB-GYNs.
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Enterprise AI teams are hitting a wall — not because their models can’t reason, but because the workflows underneath them were never built for agents. Tasks fail, handoffs break, and the problem compounds as organizations push agents deeper into back-office systems. A new architectural layer is emerging to address it: workflow execution control planes that impose deterministic structure on processes agents are expected to run.
One of the companies bringing this to the forefront is Salesforce, with a new workflow platform that turns back-office workflows into a set of tasks for specialized agents to complete. Users can upload their processes or use one of the set Blueprints provided by Salesforce, and Agentforce Operations will break it down for agents.
Salesforce senior vice president of Product, Sanjna Parulekar, told VentureBeat in an interview that the problem is that many enterprise workflows are not built for agents. “What we’ve observed with customers is that a lot of times, the brokenness in a process is probably in your product requirements document,” Parulekar said. “So when that’s uploaded into a product, it doesn’t quite work. We can optimize it and cut out some things and replace it with an agent.”
Without this control panel layer, enterprises could risk deploying agents that increase cost rather than fix their workflow problems.
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Making the workflow work for agents, not just humans
Enterprises deploying agents are learning a costly lesson: Their workflows were designed around human judgment gaps, not machine execution. Processes that evolved through years of workarounds — loosely defined steps, implicit decisions, coordination that depends on individuals knowing what to do next — break when agents are asked to follow them literally.
Even with all of an enterprise’s context at its fingertips, AI systems will have difficulty completing tasks if it is not clear what it’s supposed to do.
Parulekar said her team found that focusing on what makes the process tick and breaking it down into more explicit steps and workflows makes the system more deterministic. Then, when platforms like Agentforce Operations introduce agents, those agents already know their specific tasks.
“It forces companies to rethink their processes and introduces observability into the mix because of the session tracing model in the system,” she said.
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Parulekar said human checks can be built into the system, so the process is more transparent.
What makes this approach different from other workflow automation offerings is that it doesn’t rely on agents to decide what to do next; the system does. Unlike more traditional automation tools that route tasks and agents on probabilistic decision-making, this enforces execution on a more pre-defined, deterministic structure.
The problem it introduces
Codifying a workflow doesn’t fix a broken one. If a process has flawed steps, encoding it for agents locks in the problem at scale. And once workflows are distributed across agents, the challenge shifts from execution to governance: who owns the process, who validates it, and how it evolves when business conditions change.
It puts the onus on teams to take a hard look at what works for them and what doesn’t.
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Organizations need to consider that, along with the execution control plane offered by platforms like Agentforce Operations, someone should be made responsible for task completion and success.
Brandon Metcalf, founder and CEO of workforce orchestration company Asymbl, told VentureBeat in a separate interview that the key to both humans and agents following a workflow is a shared goal.
“You have to understand the goal or the agent or human won’t complete the task successfully,” Metcalf said. “Someone has to manage that outcome that has to be delivered. It can be a person or an agent.”
The bottleneck has moved. As Metcalf framed it, the question is no longer whether agents can reason through a task, it’s whether the workflow underneath them is coherent enough to execute. For enterprises that built their processes around human judgment and institutional memory, that’s a harder fix than swapping in a smarter model.
Producing hot water off-grid is a surprisingly energy-intensive activity, and although it looks simple on its surface it can get quite complicated especially when used in large scale for something like providing hot water for an entire home. When using combustion to heat the water there needs to be proper venting as well as control of the fuel, and even storage of the hot water needs to be meticulous to avoid certain pathogens. [Greenhill Forge] has built an off-grid solution for heating hot water that doesn’t necessarily rely on any combustion, though, provided he can find something to spin his custom electric machine.
The machine in question is, of course, an induction heater. It works similar to any simple electric motor, generator, or transformer except in this case the eddy currents generated are exploited rather than minimized. Normally these currents, generated when a magnet passes by a metal, are wasted heat in other machines but in this induction heater it’s the goal. The machine’s stator is built from copper tube wound in a spiral which allows water to flow through and absorb heat. The tube is soldered into one electrically solid mass to maximize the eddy currents. The rotor is taken from a previous generator built by [Greenhill Forge] which holds the permanent magnets.
During the initial tests using a power drill to drive the generator, he was able to heat 1.5 liters of water from 7.9C to about 24.4 C in three minutes. The math works out to providing 575 watts of power to the heater, and with something that could spin the generator faster it might have the potential to provide around 14.5 kW. Provided that there’s a source of energy around, such as a wind or water turbine, this could be a fairly sustainable way of generating hot water in off-grid situations. Some of [Greenhill Forge]’s other projects are centered around this idea as well, like one of his builds which uses waste sawdust to heat his workshop with a custom-built stove.
Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical were knocked offline on Thursday morning and have remained down ever since, a situation that’s preventing the OS provider from communicating normally following the botched disclosure of a major vulnerability.
Attempts to connect to most Ubuntu and Canonical webpages and download OS updates from Ubuntu servers have consistently failed over the past 24 hours. Updates from mirror sites, however, have continued to work normally. A Canonical status page said: “Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it.” Other than that, Ubuntu and Canonical officials have maintained radio silence since the outage began.
A decades-long scourge
A group sympathetic to the Iranian government has taken credit for the outage. According to posts on Telegram and other social media, the group is responsible for a DDoS attack using Beam, an operation that claims to test the ability of servers to operate under heavy loads but, like other “stressors,” are, in fact, fronts for services miscreants pay for to take down third-party sites. In recent days, the same pro-Iran group has taken credit for DDoSes on eBay.
Last year, Spotify removed more than 75m spam tracks from its platform.
The world’s biggest music streaming platform, Spotify, does not ban AI-generated music, but does admit that it finds it hard to detect it.
In its latest attempt to tackle growing AI spam on the platform, Spotify is introducing a vetted artist verification badge to help users identify human-made music from AI-generated ones.
Fraudulent music distribution is especially an issue for the platform, whose total artist payouts have grown from $1bn in 2014 to $10bn in 2024. However, artist payout per stream has reduced on average since 2021, further incentivising spam music to increase earnings.
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Artists who receive this verification badge are understood to show consistent listener activity and engagement, compliance with Spotify’s policies and signal a human artist behind the account. The company said that it would also look for off-platform presence such as concert dates and social media accounts.
It added that at launch, “profiles that appear to primarily represent AI-generated or AI-persona artists are not eligible for verification”.
The new badges will begin rolling out in the coming weeks, Spotify said. These will appear next to artist names in search, represented with a light green checkmark icon.
“In today’s music landscape, the concept of artist authenticity is complex and quickly evolving, and we’ll continue to develop our approach over time,” Spotify said in a blogpost on 30 April.
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“At launch, we have ensured that more than 99pc of the artists Spotify listeners actively search for will be verified, representing hundreds of thousands of artists – the majority independent – spanning genres, career stages and geographies.”
The company already has a number of other features, including ‘expanded song credits’, ‘about the song’ sections and AI credits, which help listeners find more information about the artists they listen to.
The new standards for verification, according to the company, would be paired with human reviews to identify “real artists” behaving in good faith, Spotify said. It also has an AI impersonation policy, as well as mechanisms to “better” stop fraudulent music distribution.
Last year, Spotify said that it removed more than 75m spam tracks from its platform. It acknowledged that AI is used by bad actors and content farms to create deepfakes and spam to deceive artists, pushing “slop” into the ecosystem. Spam tactics also include mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks and artificially short track abuse.
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The verification badge comes after publisher Sony Music requested the removal of 135,000 songs by fraudsters impersonating its artists on streaming services.
Meanwhile, direct-to-fan music platform Bandcamp took a more aggressive approach in January by outright banning songs “generated wholly or in substantial part by AI”.
“Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited,” the company said in a post on Reddit. Spotify, however, allows artist impersonations as long as consent is provided.
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