Spotify product director lays down how AI can enhance both audience and artist experiences
Some call Spotify a streaming service. Others might refer to it as a music distribution platform. David Nyhan prefers to think of it as a matchmaker.
Speaking in a session at the Elevate Festival in Toronto last week, Spotify’s product director described a platform that now boasts nearly 100 million tracks, along with hundreds of thousands of podcasts, audiobooks and videos. That’s a big catalog for customers to browse, and whose size also makes it difficult for individual artists to stand out.
“Users come to our platform with their own unique set of needs, whether that’s to be entertained, to express themselves through art, or to build connection and find an audience,” he said. “Our role is basically to find the best possible content and help users to navigate that.”
While Spotify has been using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of that effort since at least 2011, Nyhan said the company has intensified its use of the technology to weave it throughout the entire customer experience (CX).
Some long-running examples of these experiences include Spotify’s home screen, which reminds customers of content they recently enjoyed in case they want to dive back in, as well as new content worth exploring. Discover Weekly, meanwhile, creates a curated playlist of suggestions based on customers’ listening behaviors.
However Spotify is also in essence a two-sided marketplace, and Nyhan said the company is equally focused on making sure artists have ample opportunity to be scale discovery across global audiences. The latest advancements in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are opening up new opportunities for Spotify to pursue that mission, he said.
A recent example is Spotify’s DJ product, which uses machine learning and generative AI to develop and play tracks throughout the day, customized to individual users. The DJ also talks to customers about the rationale behind its choices, which is a critical component, Nyhan said.
“Commentary and context is really an essential part of discovering something new, whether that’s helping to understand an artist’s backstory, (or) helping to understand the inspiration behind the music,” he said.
The one thing missing from DJ was the ability for customers to engage as they would a traditional radio disk jockey. That’s changed, Nyhan said, and DJ can now take requests as customers decide they want to change the mood, vibe or genre of content presented to them. This includes texting, an option that was announced on Wednesday.
DJ is not only run by AI but makes use of real human Spotify employees who lend their voices to the product, as well as human editors who work behind the scenes to improve the curation process.
Like other streaming music services, Spotify customers also tend to spend a lot of time creating their own playlists, a process that involves browsing through its catalog and adding tracks manually. Nyhan said Spotify is offering an agentic-powered alternative to that through a partnership with ChatGPT maker Open AI that will allow AI playlists, which is similar to using generative AI prompts to write an e-mail message or lines of code.
“You can create an amazing experience simply by describing what the vibe is that you want for the playlist,” he explained. “We take that and we use that to create this great listening session.”
Spotify’s biggest takeaways so far is to ensure AI is being used to solve real problems, Nyhan said, such as building discovery and connection with artists and creators. AI should also support user choice, and while it’s less of a tangible learning, he said AI tends to work best in a CX content when it feels like magic. The technology usually doesn’t do that on its own.
“Some of the places where we find it to be most magical in its application is where you take the power of LLMs, you take the power of AI, but you combine it with human expertise,” he said. “You combine it with people who have the real specialist skill, bringing both of those together, create something that feels truly unique and truly magical to our users as well.”
