The Exchanges

Q of published music more or less instantly. I can freely sample the, uh, work of new musicians. It has become aggravatingly difficult to find what I want to listen to with a recent product update. He says it became clearer than ever what the app has been pushing me to do. Listen to what it suggests, not choose my music on my own. What do you think about that argument?

A Well, I think this is an individual feedback, but I think generally you have very different types of users. So I'm, I'm going to get, I'm going to get this person back on Spotify a hundred percent. I think there is a, there's an interesting trade off here that is, that is real. So people want less friction. Um, they want to spend less time searching. You want to make things as easy as possible. Right. But there is this end of the line where you, you sit there and you just receive, you're kind of force fed and you don't give any signal back. Maybe a few clicks and so forth. Um, and that's something that, that we want to avoid. I think this is where the industry is going. It's going more towards distraction content and sort of just sitting and receiving. And it's a little bit of a dystopian, um, end of the line there. So what is interesting with Spotify, which we are reemphasizing is that it was actually a platform where you invested quite a lot in your own playlisting, right? And the, there's a trade off here between If we, you could have a vision is we should be so good at machine learning that you should never playlist again. That would be the goal. Um, because then you've done the user a great service supposedly, but then you also receive no signal and the user does no investment. So we're actually reemphasizing playlisting quite a lot.

AI assessment note: “there's an interesting trade off here that is, that is real.”

Q Legitimately incredible. You prompt it, and how comes a great sounding song?

A It is incredible. So I think that technology is amazing. Now, my interest is to think of these technologies as tools. So if you, if you think about music, it's going through a journey of more capable tools. If you go way back, if you were a musical genius, um, Like a Bach or someone. You literally needed access to an orchestra to be able to realize that genius. Even if you could play multiple instruments yourself, you couldn't play them at the same time. So you actually needed like an orchestra. And then we got to recording music and you could record one instrument at a time. So you got more and more independent. And then somewhere around the eighties, the synthesizer came along and made that and meant that you didn't have to be able to play all the instruments yourself. You could You could sort of quote unquote fake the drums using the synthesizer and the guitar and so forth. So I think there's been this progression of more, more powerful tools that enabled more and more creativity. And then somewhere in the nineties, the DAW, the digital audio workstation came along and being a Swede, very proud of this, someone like Avicii came along. And what is interesting with Avicii is he was not very proficient at any one instrument or a singer. So in a previous world, he would not have been Considered a very creative person because he couldn't realize that with access to this tool, the…

AI assessment note: “It is incredible. So I think that technology is amazing. Now, my interest is”

Q What are you gonna do for your three year old?

A Exactly. There is the other thing is you can create a playlist for your kid. And then if you click the settings, you can say, do not include in my recommendations. And then it actually doesn't destroy your recommendations at all. Uh, so, so. There are those solutions. We're also trying to understand that all of this is kids music. So while this is part of your taste profile, we should not play this in your other sets, because this is probably something you're doing for sort of a use case. So you probably want a kids music playlist in there, but you don't want that music to affect your, your other sets. There's an algorithmic component. There's a, there's a subscription plan component, and then it's back to like more user control. You can actually already say that this playlist should not be considered my taste. And so we're going to build more of those controls.

AI assessment note: “you can create a playlist for your kid. And then if you click the settings”

Q original strategy, and now less so. Um, also audiobooks. You can find my book, Always Day One, on Spotify, if you're a premium listener, which I'm happy about, because more people can listen to, to the book. What has gone into the decision to just bring all these formats together in one app? And, um, I mean, are they good businesses for you spot, uh, uh, podcasts and audio books?

A Yes. If we start with the first one, how do we come to this decision? Uh, what happened is that we saw internally actually at Spotify, a lot of our developers sort of hacking Spotify into or hacking podcasts using RSS into the Spotify experience. And we saw it again and again at Hack Weeks. And first we thought like, maybe it's a, it's a, it's a niche random need. We saw it again and again. And so then we just, it's like user feedback, user research, you know, Spotify is still like many thousands of employees. So it's, It's not a very representative sample of society, but it is some sample of society. So if you see the same user need many times, you should take it seriously. So we started looking at that. And then we looked at podcasts that we saw had a lot of potential and was growing, but we didn't think anyone was doing something very interesting with it. So we decided to, to then, uh, just approach it because we saw the user need internally. We saw the market growing, we sized it, and then we saw that there was no one really investing in it. Apple hadn't invested in it and they had like nine to eight percent Of the market. So that's how we came to it.

AI assessment note: “If we start with the first one, how do we come to this decision?”

Q Yeah, it's massive. These type of images are massive on Meta. So from a Spotify perspective, If these songs generated by AI music generators become engaging, and let's say they follow the rules, is that good for Spotify?

A Well, I think like this, if creators are using this, uh, these technologies, they are creating music in a legal way that we reimburse and people listen to them and they are successful. We should let people listen to them. I think what is different though, I don't think it's our job to generate that music instead of the creators, right? And that's a, that's a key difference. Are we as a platform for creators? And then we can have a discussion on which tools are they allowed to use? Like they could use the, or the workstation, but not an LLM. Maybe that's not actually, we should, we shouldn't decide that for them. But there is a question. Should we generate all the music ourselves? And that's where we're saying, no, we're not going to generate that music and other platforms maybe will because it's, it's, it's cheap content, right? So that's the key difference of we decided what we want to be in this world. And it's a platform for creators. And then, then there's question which tools they are allowed to have, which is partially a legal question and partially up to, up to the creators, I think.

AI assessment note: “if creators are using this... and they are successful. We should let people listen”

Q was like, the male voice sounds like you, and I listened and I was like, not the same tone, but also the cadence and the type of questions. I'm like, does that mean that I'm just like the blend of Of all different. Am I like this, like, you know, kind of, um, the unremarkable middle of this? Or did they copy my voice? I'm hoping it's the second one.

A It'll be interesting to see if people either get tired of hearing the same two people talk about everything or the opposite. They get used to the same two people and would prefer to hear the same to build trust. I don't know. I, I think, um, I think humans are very quick and prone to sort of anthropomorphize and It's, it's sort of a hack on our human brain. So you feel like, you know, these people because you heard them talk about so many things now. So I think it's very interesting. It's hard to predict where we'll go as, as a platform. We view it the same way. Of course, people are uploading these podcasts, uh, to Spotify as well. And I don't, I don't know, um, from the top of my head how, you know, if anyone has super high engagement, but certainly people are, are listening to them. So it's the same question. Does this turn into a tool for creative people? Um, Who can write stories, but don't want to have the podcast around it or, or just have no one interviewing them. So they just do an interview around their own material. Um, I don't think, I think you're going to run into the same problem where if you just ask it to talk about something, it's not going to be very good. You need a good source material. So it's the same question. Is this a tool for creative people to get even more productive and creative, or is it replacement of creative people? My bet is it's another tool.

AI assessment note: “It'll be interesting to see if people either get tired of hearing the same two”