What to Expect from Spotify, Lyft and Pinterest Earnings This Week

After the crush of tech news last week, including a big AI-fueled stock sell-off, things might calm down a bit in the next few days. With any luck, we’ll have time to debate which of the tech companies’ Super Bowl ads running Sunday night were the best and which were the worst. My vote for best is the Amazon Alexa spot, by the way, although the Anthropic ones were also great. Google’s Gemini spot was arguably the worst: Maybe Google should have asked Gemini for help making the commercial!

Meanwhile, earnings season continues this week, with a focus on midsize companies, including several of the gig economy generation. Among the companies reporting are Spotify, Lyft, Shopify, Coinbase, Pinterest, Instacart and Airbnb. Each of these will have something worth checking out. Spotify, for instance, struggled with declining ad revenue in the second and third quarter of last year, which dragged down its overall top-line growth. That was embarrassing, given that Spotify management had said in April that 2025 would be a year where they could build on a years-long effort to accelerate the ad unit’s growth! Halfway through the year, Spotify’s ad chief exited as senior executives said things needed to move faster. And by early November, reporting the third quarter results, executives were saying changes they’d made to the ads unit would “yield significant results in the years ahead.” Oops.