Daniel Ek reveals the future of AI on Spotify
Spotify’s co-founder and CEO talks on how AI is going to develop in music streaming until it’s better than us at making playlists.
Speaking to Norges Bank, Daniel Ek discusses Spotify and its future. In the same interview where Ek described himself as “the least powerful person in Spotify”, he discusses AIs potential for taste making and how ABBA actually helped to create Spotify.
When asked about what Spotify’s plans for AI are, Ek explains how eventually AI will be better at curating our tastes than ourselves. He explains: “The number one problem consumers still have is ‘How do I find what I want to listen to?’ and equally, from the creator’s side, is ‘Help me find more audience’… It actually happens to be sort of two sides of the same coin.
“The truth is, as good as we are at recommendations, if you really put your mind to it, you could create a better playlist yourself. I think five years to ten years from now, that will not be true.”
He reveals that he thinks AI will become so good at catering to users’ personal tastes that it will give listeners things they would never choose when discovering music by themselves. He continued: “We’re going to become that trusted friend where we’re going to introduce you to things that you probably thought ‘No way in hell am I going to be interested in this’, and you’re going to be totally open to it.”
He goes on: “I think we will do a better job – even if you spent a whole working day trying to figure out what you wanted to listen to – we will be able to create a playlist that is so much better than any of that.
“So that means… right now Spotify is your friend that knows music really well, and podcasts and all that stuff, and it knows you OK, but it doesn’t understand you what you might want right at precisely this moment, or novel things that you haven’t shown appreciation for but might if we introduced it in the right way.”
ABBA helped to create Spotify?
Amongst the revelations in Daniel Ek’s interview was that ABBA played a part in the creation of the industry-changing music streaming service. Well, maybe their role was indirect – but Ek still points to it.
He explains how ABBA transformed Sweden’s place in the music industry. Their huge success introduced Sweden as an exporter of music to the world. Ek said that the country “had a healthy music ecosystem to begin with, [which] was amazing and that stems all the way back from ABBA, all the great producers, everyone else, came from there. And that created more songwriting talent, and so on, and perhaps that’s what got me into music too.”
Generally, Ek seems positive about the future of Spotify and its plans to enhance music streaming for listeners further as well as to build their platform with more non-musical content. He says: “It brings me happiness to see the impact we’re having. It brings me happiness to see when we have people inside the company, when we see them developing.”