Spotify has its hands full with generative AI. People are using tools like Suno and NotebookLM to generate synthetic music and podcasts that could fil

Spotify’s Plans For AI Generated Music, Podcasts, and Recommendations, According To Its Co-President, CTO, and CPO Gustav Söderström

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2024-11-14 09:30:02

Spotify has its hands full with generative AI. People are using tools like Suno and NotebookLM to generate synthetic music and podcasts that could fill its service. Meanwhile, the company sees the rise of LLMs as an opportunity to put users in dialogue with their recommendations, helping it respond to their feedback and serve the right mix at the right time.

To understand how Spotify plans to address these challenges and opportunities, I sat down with Gustav Söderström  — the company’s co-president, chief technology officer, and chief product officer — for a long, deep conversation on Big Technology Podcast. 

You can listen to the full conversation today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your app of choice (and we’re launching video podcasts with Spotify this week). But I thought I’d send out the full transcript because I found the conversation fascinating. Here’s my discussion with Söderström, edited lightly for clarity and length.

Gustav Söderström: If you think about music, it's going through a journey of more capable tools. Go way back, even if you were a musical genius like Bach, 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. Then we got to recorded music, and you could record one instrument at a time. So you got more and more independent. And then somewhere around the 80s, the synthesizer came along and meant that you didn't have to be able to play all the instruments yourself. You could sort of "fake" the drums using the synthesizer and the guitar and so forth. So I think there's been this progression of more powerful tools that enabled more and more creativity.

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