Scandinavian audiobook listenership has grown to nearly equal regional music listenership
Gustav Söderström · Spotify’s Journey To Profitability · Invest Like The Best · May 20, 2025 · at 1:16:46
Gustav Söderström, Spotify's Chief Product & Technology Officer, discusses the potential global growth trajectory of audiobooks compared to its established adoption in Scandinavia.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I'm hoping that audiobooks is a mainstream phenomenon as it is in Scandinavia, where, you know, it's almost as many people who listen to music listen to audiobooks.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Gustav Söderström
Competing streaming services report higher per-stream payouts because their engagement is lower
“So these other companies have higher per stream because they have a worse product.”
Most consumer products will become conversational interfaces within five to ten years
“And I think if you fast forward five to 10 years, almost all big consumer products are going to be a conversation to some extent, rather than this service that you use.”
AI's impact on non-coding engineering tasks will exceed code generation
“But then the really interesting side is these other seven hours, what a developer does, which is a lot of communication, planning, working with designers, prototyping meetings. Those things I think will actually have as big or even more impact than the coding …”
Spotify adopted the Chinese super-app model to combat declining app store installs
“Our entire strategy is basically, we decided this many years ago before it was popular, but you saw the Chinese app, the Chinese starting to build super apps, whereas the Western world built one app per use case. We kind of adopted the Chinese super app idea a…”
Enterprise AI adoption primarily requires traditional API engineering, not AI engineering
“And actually, so actually my biggest job to enable AI is not AI engineering. It's old school engineering, exposing all this, these, this data that we have so that you can have a reasoning engine reason for you as a product person, or actually for me as a consu…”
AI currently delivers only a disappointing 7% developer speedup in big tech
“I've seen studies from other big companies that if you actually measure out of a developer's time, this, the speed up is like seven percent or something, which sounds very disappointing because of all these things, like the net new coding is a small part, net …”