Spotify is aiming to launch a paid tool in early 2027 that would let subscribers turn existing songs into AI-made covers and remixes, such as a rock track reworked as a dance version, the Financial Times reported on October 30. The add-on could cost an extra $4 to $5 a month on top of Premium, though the price has not been decided and Spotify has not confirmed the plans. According to the report, progress has been slower than expected because major current stars have been harder to sign up than some established older artists. Universal, which first announced a remix deal with Spotify in May, has joined, as have the independent-label agency Merlin and the distributor Believe, while Sony and Warner are still negotiating.

Artists signed to those labels can still decide for themselves whether their songs are used, and those who take part are expected to receive a share of the extra fees when fans alter their music. Olivia Rodrigo told The Hollywood Reporter in early October that she would never use AI in her music. Bernstein analyst Ian Moore estimates that 7 to 8 percent of Spotify’s paying U.S. customers could use the service by the end of 2028. Before any full launch, co-CEO Gustav Söderström has said, a public test version will open to some users.

Workers who lost jobs likely tied to AI since 2025 took about a month longer to find new work than other laid-off workers, according to a note by Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei reported by Fortune on October 30. They were also roughly 10 percentage points likelier to still be unemployed a year later. Because no survey asks about AI directly, Goldman scored over 15,000 people in a federal survey who lost jobs involuntarily between 2016 and 2025 by their occupation’s AI exposure, their industry’s AI adoption and whether the position was eliminated, treating the top 30 percent as likely AI losses. For job losses before 2023, when AI use began to rise, the two groups showed no significant gap.

The gap was wider for older workers. Those 35 and older took about five weeks longer than other displaced workers to return to full-time work, against about three weeks for those under 35, and older workers who were rehired more often landed in jobs just as exposed to AI. Mei called the effects comparable to earlier waves of new technology and “long-lasting.” Labor Department figures released in August show the age pressure across all layoffs. By January 2026, 72.9 percent of long-tenured displaced workers aged 25 to 54 were working again, compared with 57.3 percent of those aged 55 to 64.

On October 30, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic said they will respect a single instruction that website owners can place in robots.txt, the plain text file sites already use to tell automated visitors which pages to skip. A site that adds a group headed “User-Agent: __usage_ai-training” followed by “Disallow: /” is asking all four companies not to use its pages to train their AI models, and it can leave chosen sections open, such as a press area. The signal comes from a draft written by Kevin Kelley, a standards lead at Anthropic, and submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the body that sets many of the internet’s technical rules. For now the draft has no formal standing there.

The companies have set different dates. Anthropic says it has started adding support, OpenAI promises it in the coming months, Microsoft will apply it from February 1, 2027, and Google says it aims to do so in 2027. Compliance is voluntary, other AI companies are not bound, and Meta has not committed to it. The rule also works only going forward, so pages already collected stay in existing training data. The common rule that blocks every bot at once does not count as a training preference, which means newsrooms, artists and small businesses that want out must add the new entry by name. Microsoft is also adding a second setting that lets a page refuse to feed the answers written by Bing and Copilot.