Spotify: A Product Story

We’re back! And today we dig into Spotify’s AI DJ. Since its inception, radio provided a music format that was convenient and simple, but far from personal. Spotify’s solution? AI DJ, a bespoke experience that provides listeners with the content they want through generative AI technology. After years of experimentation, we created a product that captures the fun and usefulness of a radio DJ, but b...

2023 may be a year that people still speak about 100 years from now, the year computers passed the Turing test! You know what these things can do , but do you actually understand how they can do it? How is it that we have services like Chat GPT that can write entire novels, and services like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney that can create amazing images or even music from just a text description o...

What’s Spotify up to next? Tune in to the season finale to hear about Spotify’s plans for the future of audio and the brand new formats that we’re launching today and in the near future. As always, when building something new, we don’t know how it’s all going to play out yet, or exactly what the product strategy lessons will be. But we do know which bets we’re making, and why we’re making them. Th...

This is the story of Backstage -- a “platform of platforms”, built by Spotify and open to anyone as open source software. Tune in to hear insights about when to build vs buy - and when to open source - or not! Interviews with Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect.io , a company that runs on what is called an open core model, as well as from Spotify insiders like Pia Nilsson, Director of Engineering and T...

How do you go “from zero to one”? In this episode, you’ll learn how Spotify managed to enter a market late: a market that was already dominated by a single player - our biggest competitor in music. This is the story of how we entered podcasts. Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, and Sten Garmark shed light on the insights that led Spotify into the podcast arena. Tune in as we explore Spotify’s bet on po...

In this episode you’ll learn about Spotify’s journey into the painful complicated world of hardware. You’ll hear how we worked our way down to the very bottom of the stack in our quest to create the “perfect listening session” in the home, how we had to build a completely new media streaming protocol in the process and how we ultimately found a way for users to pass something called: “The Beer Tes...

This episode is especially geared towards CEOs/CTOs that have to "kill their darlings" and make hard choices. Listen to Google employee number 8 - and SVP of infrastructure at Google - Urs Hölzle, as well as Spotify insiders Tyson Singer, Nicole Bouchard and Emil Fredriksson as we journey from "brilliant" proprietary tech on a few servers in a cupboard, in an apartment, through buying thousands of...

Will AI truly replace us humans when it comes to music? Listen to machine learning (ML) legend Andrew Ng and Spotify insiders on what it really means to develop products in an AI/ML first world, how we invented the term “Algotorial” and how reinforcement learning (RL) applies to music. Features interviews with Andrew Ng, Oskar Stål, Ajay Kalia, Meg Tarquinio, and Tony Jebara. Transcript here &nbsp...

This episode tells the story of how Spotify went into negative growth and nearly didn’t survive to it’s 5th birthday as the world around us suddenly changed…. You’ll learn how we had to reinvent our entire business model and find a new free tier that worked in a mobile first world.  You’ll hear from people like world-class technology investor and analyst Mary Meeker, as well as early Spotify...

In this episode we tackle how Spotify went from being a popular free desktop app - but that nobody paid for - to being a mobile app that people actually paid for - even though users already had all their pirated music on their phones for free…  It includes interviews with: Kenneth Parks, Mattias Arrelid, Petra Hansson. Bonus - If you want to see what the magic trick actually looked like back...

This is the story behind Spotify’s first product -- the desktop app. We explore how the first iteration of Spotify came to be, and identify the four biggest lessons learned through the process - lessons that still shape the company to this day, almost 15 years later. Hear the story from the source, featuring interviews with Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek, and former Spotify teammates Ludde Stri...

This is where the Spotify product story begins. In this episode, we dive into the world that set the stage for Spotify and the streaming music revolution. In the early 2000s, piracy was killing the music industry. Music had moved to digital, and there was no going back - but something had to be done. We hear from some of the key players from that time - including Lars Ulrich of Metallica, Sean Par...

Product lessons from Spotify's past and future, hosted by Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström.