Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Business

4.3 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss CEO Daniel Ek put it last week, it’s “the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.” With the title of co-president and chief product and technology officer, Söderström is responsible for not only how Spotify looks and feels but also all the AI work happening behind the scenes to power its increasingly important recommendations. According to Söderström, it turns out that improving those recommendations is actually at the heart of the big redesign. “I think companies that don’t have an efficient user interface for a machine learning world are not going to be able to leverage machine learning,” he told Alex Heath on the newest episode of Decoder. Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its global workforce, CEO announces Spotify’s new design turns your music and podcasts into a TikTok feed Alex Heath's Tweet Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23402123 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:56.6	What's going on with Spotify?
1:13.2	Well, Spotify just had this big stream on event in Los Angeles last week, and after the
1:18.3	event I spoke to Gustav Sotestrom, he's Spotify's co-president overseeing all of product
1:23.4	and engineering.
1:24.8	He's been at Spotify for a long time.
1:26.9	He actually led the development of their first mobile app in 2009, back when the company
1:31.4	was about 30 people.
1:32.9	I would say the biggest news to come out of this event was this controversial redesign
1:37.0	that Spotify is doing to look like TikTok, like you said.
1:40.4	There's a lot of strong reaction to it on social media.
1:43.0	People obviously get upset whenever apps they love have big visual changes.
1:48.1	And the reason behind the change that Gustav walked me through I thought was really interesting.
1:53.1	But yeah, Spotify's embracing feeds.
1:55.8	This is a big trend across the industry.
	...

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