Spotify’s move to cater to music’s superfans is now going live. On Thursday, the streaming giant announced the launch of “Reserved by Spotify,” a new system that will identify eligible top fans of an artist, then hold two tour tickets for them before the general ticket sale opens.

The feature will first be available starting today in the U.S. for Premium subscribers (ages 18+). Timed alongside his tour news, Role Model will be the first artist partner to take advantage of the ticket-holding system, and fans will begin to receive notifications about their secured tour tickets starting on June 23, before the general public sale. Spotify said it won’t collect any fees on the transactions.

The feature is only available for artists playing at the Live Nation venues for now, and ticket sales are through Ticketmaster. The streamer said it aims to add more partners over time to include smaller venues as well as international users.

The Reserved system is designed to reward music fans at a time when tickets for new concerts are immediately captured by scalpers using automated tools, which are then resold at a higher price as the event sells out.

For Spotify, Reserved serves as an easy way to encourage paid subscriptions and increase engagement with its app. If fans are getting concert tickets held for them by streaming their favorites, they’re more likely to log on and do just that.

Spotify first announced its plan to cater to superfans in May, noting that it would use signals like streams, shares, and other activity to determine who it considers a real fan. The company also said the platform would monitor activity to ensure that fans don’t game these stats using bots or AI agents.

In other words, it won’t be possible to snag the ticket by endlessly playing an artist’s music over and over — the company will be looking for signals that you’re still engaging with its app as a normal user would. Or, as Spotify puts it, “leaving music on in the background won’t give anyone a leg up.”

Reserved will also look at the user’s location to ensure they’re near the show before making an offer.

After going live, eligible fans will see a personalized offer on their Spotify Home screen, allowing them to view tour dates, see the Reserved window, and set a reminder to buy the tickets. When the window for the Reserved tickets opens — usually around a day — they can purchase two tickets before they’re on sale to the public.

In addition, Spotify noted that there will be more superfans than there are seats available in many cases, which means not every fan will get an offer of tickets every time.

Role Model, whose tour is reaching 17 U.S. cities and shows, will be the first of “a slate” of additional artists’ tours launching this week, noted Spotify without naming names.

Adobe is updating its Firefly AI assistant with new chops, and adding it to Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io.

The company has given the assistant new abilities to make brand kits, product videos, and storyboards . Plus, the Firefly app now lets users save whatever they’ve created as an element that can be used across projects.

In Premiere, users can use the AI assistant to sort assets into bins, batch-rename clips, identify interview questions and add markers. And in Illustrator, the assistant can do things like reorganize layers across a document or check for missing fonts.

Firefly is already usable with Express, Photoshop, and Acrobat, and is supported by ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. Adobe said that it plans to add support for Google Gemini and Slack soon.

Firefly updates

Adobe is slowly transforming Firefly to increasingly resemble Canva, at least when it comes to AI features, loading up the app with AI tools that can generate images, videos and storyboards. The company is now adding a new feature called Elements that can save AI-generated characters, objects and locations for later use.

Firefly is also getting a Projects feature that can store existing assets in one place, and share context. This could be useful for teams creating a video series or brand campaigns. Both of these features are currently available in a private beta.

The company said users can now describe a brand and its style, or upload existing collateral, in Firefly to have it generate a brand kit, complete with logos, brand identity and color palettes, or even generate product videos from photos. Users can also create storyboards to create videos.

Adobe is hard at work adding AI throughout its apps, and it is also working on an AI assistant that can work across its apps. The idea is to use AI to automate some of the tool usage within its apps that took several steps previously.

Waymo has recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to restrict them from driving on highways while it figures out how to make the vehicles behave around construction zones.

The recall comes after Waymo identified at least 13 instances of its robotaxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction. Six of these happened in Phoenix, Arizona in April, and seven occurred in San Francisco, California in May.

Waymo pulled its robotaxis from all highways on May 19, and a fix for the problem is “currently under development,” according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The company is not pulling vehicles off the road and is still operating on surface streets, though the company has periodically paused service during severe weather that could lead to flooding.

“We identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA.”

This is the sixth recall Waymo has issued for its robotaxis. In May, the company recalled its robotaxis after they drove into flooded roads, and in December, it issued one to address its vehicles’ illegal behavior around school buses. Waymo has previously issued recalls to fix low-speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles, and one to solve a problem regarding towed trucks.

The company’s driving software is currently under investigation by the NHTSA and National Transportation Safety Board regarding its behavior around school buses after one of its robotaxis struck a child near a school in January.

Alphabet-owned Waymo says its vehicles have driven more than 170 million miles autonomously, and claims they have demonstrated a 13x reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes when compared to human drivers.

The robotaxi company is in the middle of a massive expansion, planning to launch in more than 20 cities this year alone, including in London and Tokyo. The expansion has helped highlight a number of edge cases that Waymo’s robotaxi software has struggled with, which now includes highway construction zones.

Waymo, which started offering highway rides in November 2025, told the NHTSA that its robotaxis “did not recognize and drove past ramp closure signs into pre-planned freeway construction zones” in mid-April in Phoenix. After a review, the company’s “Field Safety Committee” restricted freeway operations in the city while Waymo worked on a fix, the NHTSA documents show.

On May 18, seven Waymo robotaxis drove into highway lanes under active construction in the San Francisco Bay Area because the company’s software was “prioritizing the avoidance of other freeway hazards and/or failing to recognize the construction zone.” The company suspended all freeway driving the following day. Waymo’s safety board decided to issue the recall on June 8.

Footage of some of these incidents were shared on social media. On May 19, X user @Elliot_slade posted a video where they claimed a Waymo “blasted through cones,” and said it was “chased” by police.

“There were construction signs,” Slade told CBS News last month. “There were lights going on. Police in the distance and it sped up. That’s when I looked at my fiancée, we’re done. This is it. We’re dead. We’re going to die right here in the Waymo.”

Waymo offered Slade “three free rides up to $40 each in the future,” according to CBS.