Earlier this week Spotify celebrated its 20th birthday, and to mark the milestone I spoke with Sten Garmark, the music-streaming giant's Global Head of Consumer Experience, about the company's early years, and its impact on both the music industry and the wider culture.
In the second part of our discussion, we turned to the future, and discussed what Spotify plans to achieve in the next 20 years and beyond. When we first spoke, Garmark teased that Spotify always has ideas up its sleeve — and let’s just say the platform has some ambitious plans, including moving into new formats.
“We went from music, and we've added wonderful new types of creative people to the platform,” says Garmark. “We've added podcasters and their conversations, and now we have the world's most interesting people come and have conversations for hours. And for authors it’s the same thing. People can put their whole life into writing a book, and it’s just instantly available at your fingertips.”
Music, podcasts, and audiobooks are Spotify’s core formats, and though not all subscribers will make the most of all three, the company still prides itself on giving its members options. “I feel like as humans, this has never existed in the past,” says Garmark. “You can live anywhere and you can have access to everything. It's really inspiring and fun.”
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And for Garmark, there are no limits to where Spotify might go next. “I think we're going to add some more formats that people are going to love from more creative people. So that's probably in our future,” he tells me.
User control and personalization are the foundation of the platform’s entire existence. Over the last 20 years Spotify has doubled down on allowing users to shape their own in-app experiences, and it’s Garmark’s mission to push this even further in future developments.
“I spoke about having more control. The unlocking of AI enables users in their own language, to express who they want to be and what they aspire to do," he says. “Not what an algorithm believes they should do, but what they want to do themselves. It's an inflection point, and I think we have a business model where this makes sense.”
However, Garmark admits that Spotify has been a bit of a “singular player” when it comes to establishing communities. “We've had a multitude of social features. But we think that we can do more in the domain of features of multiplayer that you do with your friends,” he continues, hinting at plans to enrich Spotify’s connectivity tools like Jam and Messages.
“We have many more ideas in this domain, in creating conversations between people (that otherwise wouldn’t happen) around the most inspiring people on the planet. We hope to invest a lot more there.”
Right now Spotify is pretty much omnipresent in terms of its availability on different devices and platforms. Spotify Connect allows you to smoothly play music through compatible smart speakers, while Apple CarPlay and Android Auto give you easy access to music via your car’s dashboard. So where does it go from there?
“This is close to heart”, Garmark reveals. “From a user's standpoint, we’re by far the most ubiquitous experience for music, podcasts, and audiobooks. We’re essentially everywhere. If a brand is launching a consumer product of any type, they call us in advance; ‘I need to have Spotify on my thing, otherwise I can't sell it’. And we have great experiences for all sorts of form factors. We’re available across more than 2000 different device types right now, and of course, there's more coming out all the time.”
The AI plague looms
As the brand looks towards the next 20 years, there’s one major threat Spotify and other music streamers are facing — the rise of AI-generated music and AI clones. There are two sides to the AI debate. The first celebrates it as a helpful production tool which, in terms of championing the creative choices of its artists, Spotify acknowledges.
“Artists on the platform tend to be the people that use the technology first,” Garmark observes. “If you look at the past, when electric guitars came out, they used that, and then you could make music with a turntable and sampler, and then with a computer. So it's a creative tool.
“We're working with the industry to help artists annotate parts of the song that were made with AI, and they can publish that. We believe in transparency to the user.”
But there’s also a malicious side to AI — chiefly fraudulent streams and artist impersonation — which Garmark expresses deep concern about. “There’s a downside in that there are other people that want to scam us and the artists by trying to divert users' listening and attention to things that they don't want to listen to. Basically to have an economic gain from that”, he says.
The company is already taking action on this front. “In the last 12 months, we've removed 25 million AI tracks,” Garmark tells me. “We have rules against impersonation, and we've also helped set up new protectionist mechanisms for artists so that they can more securely control what goes up on their platform.”
The last 20 years was just the start for Spotify, and there’s no doubt the next 20 years will see it shaking things up even more.
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