Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström, on this week’s DecoderPod
I figured you did. I have a feeling that this will naturally lead into the news you all announced today. First, I’d love to start with your story. You’ve been at Spotify for a long time — 14 years. If I’m correct, I think the first big product you worked on was bringing Spotify to mobile.Right. The company had about 30 employees at the time.
We had to figure out what the experience was. Pretty quickly, we realized that it would have to work offline. We had to fix new licenses from labels for this offline mode that didn’t exist, that way you could encrypt and keep music locally available with a key that the user wasn’t supposed to be able to decipher and that would then expire.
It’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe it is unusual. My background is in computer science and electrical engineering. I am genuinely interested in technology for the sake of technology, but I’ve also been a CEO and founder of my own company. I have that mindset, I guess. I enjoy technology and spend a lot of time on it. I’m not a great developer, unfortunately. No one lets me touch code at Spotify. Not anymore, at least.on January 23rd.
That’s part of the reason, but there is a more intrinsic reason for this. We presented this thing called the Spotify machine on investor day last summer, and we told the investor community, even though it was open to everyone, that they should think of Spotify as a music application. To build that music application, we had to build a lot of technology.
But it comes with a challenge. If you’re going to build this thing into the same application, you’re going to make it back to trade-offs. The trade-off is that you can’t just make the application more complicated. There are benefits to that, but there are also drawbacks. From a pure designer product point of view, it’s much easier to build a separate app because you can optimize for that 100 percent. On the flip side, you’re going to start with zero users.
We built this org where we have three horizontal layers. We have a platform layer, which is the Spotify technology platform. We have the Spotify experience layer, which is all the applications, surfaces, mobile apps, cars, and desktops owned by a single person. Then we have a personalization layer.
I’m glad you brought up the American angle actually, because I did notice Daniel’s note about the reorg — he’s the CEO of Spotify — the word “efficiency” being used.. It’s kind of become a buzzword in the tech community this year. I think it’s kind of the theme of the year, actually. Spotify is based in Sweden, but obviously has huge roots in the American tech community. It’s a global company.
At Spotify, we can actually have all the decision and execution-makers in one room. That’s a competitive advantage. We tend to reason quite a lot and use different frameworks for that. It’s the Charlie Munger quote that you should run anything through at least three frameworks. If they agree, there’s a good chance that you’re right, because any framework reduces dimensions. If you only use one, there’s a risk that your framework misses a dimension.
He’s still the CEO, and that’s a big competitive advantage for this company. Most companies aren’t CEO-led or founder-led anymore in Silicon Valley. So yes, there is a tie-breaker in case that happens, but Alex and I have worked together for 10-plus years or something. So far that hasn’t happened. The idea is we debate a lot, and that can be heated.
I don’t think it’s an accident. The world didn’t just randomize into these auto-playing cards. It is evolution. It is the most effective way to quickly understand and evaluate lots of content. We have to respect those innovations. Spotify had a different type of feed, a two-dimensional feed, which was sort of state-of-the-art many years ago, but things change. They have to, and so does Spotify.
When you open it and feel like you want to find new music, we want that to be incredibly easy. What I want to achieve is that after one of these sessions you feel like, “Oh my God, my library is full of stuff that I want to listen to now, while I’m driving or when I’m running, in the background .” It is a different optimization metric. Back to the tweet, isn’t it antithetical with an endless feed? The feed isn’t actually endless.Okay, that’s interesting.
There was an interesting stat mentioned today that 25 percent of artists on Spotify self-release, they’re not signed to any big label. There’s also a stat, I think from the 2021 Stream On, where you all said you want to be the home to 50 million creators by 2025.
The big reason why we haven’t been that aggressive on what is traditionally called “explore-exploit” is because we didn’t feel comfortable exploring things that we didn’t understand. We’ve seen other companies end up in bad places, so we just held off. The solution to doing that safely until a year ago was to have 20, 40, 50,000 moderators somewhere in the world. You can do it differently now with machine learning.
The other thing is the reaction this is going to get from users. You have been A / B testing this in the wild for the last several weeks. I would love to hear what you’ve learned from that test and how that gave you the conviction to launch this to everyone. Anecdotally, there’s a lot of heated reaction to this. I don’t know if you pay attention to the posts on social media about the tests of this.
I also find that for one reason or another, right now in 2023, people are very skeptical of new things. I saw this with the AI DJ. When we announced it, I saw a lot of tweets like, “Oh, this is going to be crap for this and that reason.” Then as we rolled it out, that started shifting and people were saying it’s amazing. For one reason or another, people are quite skeptical before they try it.
“You need a different user interface where you can evaluate things more quickly and where you can be wrong.” That’s the problem. Then you backtrack. What do we need to solve that problem? Is it an algorithmic challenge? No. To explore-exploit and try new things has been around forever. It is partially a safety problem and it is partially a UI problem. That’s why we built this.
One of the challenges that we foresee and try to address is that one difference we have from many of these other platforms is that they are only about new content. You actually never expect to see the same thing. This is very different from music. Eighty percent of the use case is to go back to the same playlist, the same songs, or the same podcast. Music, specifically, has an enormous amount of repeat listening.
At Amazon, they have this framework for decisions that can be divided into two categories, it’s a one-way or a two-way door. Is this a one-way? This sounds like a one-way, like there’s no coming back from this. It sounds like you guys have decided this is what the app needs, where the app needs to go for the business.
If you look at the announcement today, we show a lot of video because it is something that is happening right now. It’s something we’re excited about, and we talked about it a lot today, but it is still the case that the majority of podcasting is audio. I think there are distinct formats of podcasting, which are supposed to be audio. Then there are some forms of podcasting that benefit greatly from having video because it’s a face-to-face discussion.
The podcast auto-play feature you announced, where you’re going to start auto-playing podcasts after one ends, are you pulling that from a listener’s other shows or are you suggesting new shows to them?
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