Spotify hosted an ‘Open House’ event for journalists at its office in Stockholm this week. Music Ally was there, getting the views of some of the company’s key executives on the current streaming landscape.
Something we wanted to ask about – and did, in the session with CEO Daniel Ek – was superfans. Recent leaks about Spotify’s plans for its ‘Music Pro’ tier suggested that hi-res audio, early access to concert tickets and some kind of remixing feature are among its plans.
However, when superfans are asked what they value most, they have tended to say different things: more access to and engagement with artists, and communities where they can be recognised for their fandom by their peers.
Is Spotify planning to serve those needs? Ek agreed that it is “incredibly right” that this is what superfans want. But rather than let slip any specific plans, he talked about the bigger picture of trying to do this.
“If you’re an artist and you have a big fanbase, you actually do want to talk to them too. But how do you scale it? And how do you make that so that it’s not then an exclusionary thing?” he said.
Ek cited Spotify’s existing Fans First initiative, where targeted emails invite artists’ keenest fans to buy tickets or merch, as the kind of feature he’d like to see more of.
“What more things can we do like Fans First that scales, and that provides a great experience for the artist, and provides a great experience for the consumer? That’s how we think,” he said.
“But I do agree that the need – the creator need or the artist need – exists. And the consumer need is there too. The question is just how do you create a great experience?”
This being a music-industry event in the year 2025, you couldn’t escape the topic of AI. Ek was somewhat philosophical when answering questions about the distinction between AI-generated music and human-created music – and what Spotify should do about it.
“This is the early days of creativity [in the AI age]. We want more humans to make it as artists and creators, but what is creativity in the future with AI? I don’t know. What is music anyway?” said Ek.
He drew a parallel with Google Veo, the recently-released GenAI video model.
“You can now generate full-on videos entirely like that. But can’t you express a vision like that and create a really cool animated series? And does that mean you’re a lesser artist than someone who hand-drew all of these things yourself?” said Ek, adding that it’s wider society that will “have to wrestle with these types of issues”.
Spotify’s head of artist and industry partnerships, Bryan Johnson, was later asked about the impact AI-generated music is having on Spotify.
Johnson said that there is “infinitely small consumption of fully AI-generated tracks on Spotify”, adding that “there is no dilution of the royalty pool by AI music.” Although the wary response to that may be: not yet.
Outside the music itself, Spotify is excited about AI for the potential it brings to get a better understanding of its listeners, particularly as they start talking to Spotify rather than simply tapping or clicking on its apps.
“We’re excited about GenAI because it gives us English language input for the first time… It’s now not just clicks on streams,” said CPO and co-president Gustav Söderström. He went on to predict that in the future, most apps will move to language-driven input – prompts rather than clicks.
The ‘Open House’ event also saw Spotify’s chief financial officer Christian Luiga probed about the potential for further rises in the company’s subscription pricing. He warned that Spotify is keenly aware of the risk of alienating its customers.
“The day we start to compromise on the value-to-price ratio… then we are going in a totally different direction. We don’t even want to think about that day, because that’s not part of our DNA,” he said.
A situation where a price increase boosts Spotify’s bottom line “but then loses 10% of its subscribers is not worth it for us, because that’s not our strategy. We don’t even discuss those things in our management team,” he said.
Finally, Söderström was asked about Spotify’s end-of-year Wrapped 2024 promotion. While it was popular in terms of the number of people it reached, there was also a noticeable uptick in criticism online.
“If you look at the numbers it was the biggest Wrapped we’ve ever had. But there was more negative feedback than we’ve seen before,” admitted Söderström. “So, we just need to do better – there’s a lot of pressure for this year’s Wrapped to be a much better version.”
“I think people just wanted something newer, something that wasn’t there the year before. There was also some feedback that some of the things people loved from years before were not there,” he continued.
“We didn’t just want to tack on everything that we ever did – maybe we should have.” But with planning already well underway for the 2025 edition of Wrapped, Söderström said that Spotify is “working hard on making it the best that it’s ever been.”
