Spotify is now the “R&D department for the music industry,” one of the company’s co-CEOs said in an earnings call last week in comments which anticipate stuffing more AI into the streaming giant’s secret algorithms.
Spotify’s 4th quarter earning call featured comments by founder and executive chair Daniel Ek as well as the two executives that replaced him as CEO. All three emphasized the company’s position in the technology sector and use of AI to “interact with content.”
But it was co-CEO Gustav Söderström that emphasized the company’s dominant position in the music industry. Spotify, he said in comments on the earnings call, considers itself “the R&D department for the music industry.”
[ Read More: How Spotify turned dance music into dance muzak ]
“Our job is to understand new technologies quickly and capture their potential, which we’ve done time and again,” Söderström said.
Söderström stated that “the entire industry stands to benefit” from an AI “paradigm shift.”
Söderström’s statement more or less reflects reality: Spotify determines how long songs can be and the algorithm has now shaped (some would say “deform”) how tracks are written, arranged and exploited for commercial gain. It may bother some that few of these changes seem like improvements, but it’s impossible to avoid that the majority of music made after at least 2020 bears the influence of not a cultural shift or breakthrough artist but the mass appeasement of a technological algorithm.
[ Read More: Streamwashed: Big tech, little money and how music marketing went crazy ]
Söderström was previously Chief Product & Technology Officer and was named co-CEO with Alex Norström after Ek announced he was stepping into the executive chairman role in September 2025.
(The picture above is not Gustav Söderström but an incredibly realistic simulation.)
