Gustav Söderström
speaker
294 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Gustav Söderström’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You're copy pasting prompts from Twitter or whatever. In an app like Spotify, how willing are people to get not lazy and really descriptive about what they actually want? What have you learned about the nature of people's laziness versus willing to put a lot of work in to get the thing that they want via that more rich uplink.
Yeah, so that's probably the most exciting thing for us of this generative AI age and the dual uplink paradigm. So previously, we mostly relied on some explicit input when you playlist. That's high value information. You are sitting there thinking, this song goes really well with this song and that song.
So if you think about it as labeling, even though you're playlisting for yourself, you're sort of labeling these tracks, at least in relation to each other. And you're putting a lot of effort in it. And that was and is our big advantage in music recommendations, even though generative recommendation systems are starting to take over from these more old school collaborative systems.
So we had some really strong signal like that, where you quite seldomly invested a lot of time in producing a data set that described you about playlisting. But most of the time, We just had skips. And the challenge for us is the phone is in the pocket. So even if we had a thumbs up down, you're not going to take out the phone every time and say, I didn't like this because of that.
Or even do a thumbs up, thumbs down requires you to take up your phone, unlock it, open Spotify. What you can do from your earphone is to skip. So we have the skip signal, but that is a very blunt signal. So we play you a song and you skip it. That could be because you absolutely hated it. It could be because you love it, but it's a hundred times. You're tired of it. It could be that you love it.
You're not tired of it, but you're at the gym. So jazz is not the right thing. All of those just look like a skip to us. We have a lot of that signal, but it's blunt and you will never get to perfect personalization through that. Now what we find with Generative AI, one of the first services that we've launched that is live now in 40 countries is something called AI Playlisting.
We literally use an LLM that is trained on your listening data and world knowledge and so forth. And you can literally tell us in English what kind of playlist you want. Previously, you could playlist songs and maybe put a title on it. We could guess this is probably a running playlist. So we could do something. Now you can say, I want a running playlist that is EDM. I want big drops.
I want it to be 160 BPM. And then you get a suggestion from the LLM. And then you can keep a few tracks and say, these were good. These were not good. Now refine it. I don't like these artists, but I want more of that. So for us, it's the first time that we get that kind of fidelity of what is actually in the user's mind.
When we think about Spotify, we always try to reproduce a small part of your neocortex on our servers, which is very hard with a click stream of skips. Now, when you tell us what is in your mind, it gets easier to approximate you as a person. So this is really the first time that we have that signal. One way I like to think about it is when we do user research, we do two things.
We do quantitative testing, A-B test, but before that, we do qualitative testing. We interview a few people deeply to understand the need. Then we build a product and then we A-B test to see if we're right. The promise of generative AI is really a deep, ongoing, qualitative user research with almost 700 million users all the time. It sounds big, but if you squint at it, that's kind of what it is.
It's interesting how many different ways you could take the product with this new technology. I would be really curious to know the apparatus inside of Spotify, the leadership team, the product team, and literally how you run the process of deciding what to do with your big team, obviously, but no matter what, you have limited effort, limited units of energy you can apply.
So there's a huge space of stuff you could do with this technology and the exciting advantage that you have of the 700 million users. What is the literal meeting by meetings process, the setup process look like? And the reason I'm asking this question is so many companies face this same challenge.
It's exciting, but also scary that they need to get the innovation before somebody else does and disrupts them. So what is the background process for how you arrive at the things you might try?
There are really two things. We have a very structured process that I want to talk through how it works. But there are also some concepts that we use. And over the years, I've introduced some strategic frameworks to the company, which I know you're passionate about, like Seven Powers from Hamilton Helmer. Bundling framework, Shishir Marothra has wrote.
He's on the board, right?
He's on the board. Secret weapon. Exactly. Very good secret weapon. And also I found Better, Simpler Strategy by Felix Oberhausen to be very good. What's that one? I don't know. It's a concept of the value stick where you have willingness to pay. It's very important for us. The way we measure value is your willingness to pay. But what it introduces is also the willingness to sell.
If you think about your staff, what is their willingness to sell their services to you? And everyone focuses on increasing the willingness to pay, but you can also increase or, depending on how you think about it, decrease the willingness to sell. And it turns out the best companies in the world are not necessarily the ones who actually pay the most.
It's the ones with the most interesting mission, the best culture, etc. So because we're a bundled service where we try to just give users more and more value, all the time. We put in lots of music, that's value. Then we put in more podcasts, that's value. Now we put in books, it's more value. This framework of willingness to pay and willingness to sell fits our business really well.
And the job of us is to keep the willingness to pay quite far from the actual price. That gap is how much consumer surplus you're giving. And our goal as a service is to make sure that this Spotify is just an amazing deal. You're always going to feel the willingness to pay. The actual value you perceive is way over the price that we have. So we use that framework quite a lot.
So introducing these frameworks, not just in the business org, but also in the product and technology org, makes people think in more structured ways. It makes people have a vocabulary. We can talk about network effects, amortization, brand power, all of these things. So I spend a lot of time getting the teams to use these frameworks so that we have structured strategic thinking.
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