YouSaid · the spoken record

Gustav Soderstrom

lines on the record: 123
first: 2019-07-29
most recent: 2019-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Assimulates it enough, or it somehow actually is. I think there's it's only a question. If you ask me about time, I'd have a bit of an answer, but if you say a given some half infinite time, absolutely. I think it's just atoms and arrangement of information.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is my personal answer Speaking for me as a person, the answer is quite unequivocally yes on both. I think what we just said about podcasts and the feeling of being in the middle of a conversation. You could have an assistant where, and we just said that feels like a very personal setting. So if you walk around with these headphones and this thing you're speaking with this thing all of the time that feels like it's in your brain, I think it's Going to be much easier to fall in love with than something that would be on your screen. I think that's entirely possible. And then from the, you can probably answer this better than me, but from the concept of if it's going to be possible to build a machine that. Can achieve that? I think whether you think of it as if you can fake it, the philosophical zombie that it's.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. VR is happening and working. I think the recent Oculus quest is quite impressive. I think AR is further away, at least that type of AR. I think, but I do think... Your phone or watch or glass is understanding where you are and maybe what you're looking at and being able to give you audio cues about that, or you can say, what is this? And it tells you what it is. That I think might happen. You use your watch or your glasses as a mouse pointer on reality. I think it might be a while before, I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I think it might be a while before we walk around with these big lab glasses that project things.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Require as large physical devices. So I definitely think there's a future where you can have your airpods and your watch and you can do a lot of computing. And I don't think it's going to be this binary thing. I think it's going to be like many of us still have a laptop. We just use it less. And so you shift your consumption over. And I don't know about AR glasses and so forth. I'm excited about it. I spend a lot of time in that area, but I still think it's quite far away”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think computing will kind of get more integrated when we won't necessarily think of it as connected to a device and the same thing in the same way that we do today. I don't know the path to that maybe we used to have these desktop computers and then we partially replaced that with the laptops and left desktop at home and at work and then we got these phones and we started leaving the laptop at home for a while and maybe the Maybe for stretches of time, you're going to start using the watch and you can leave your phone at home for a run or something, and we're on this progressive path where I think what is happening with voice is that. You have an interaction paradigm that doesn't”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that one way to think about it is that computing might be moving out of these multi-purpose devices, the computer we had and the phone, into specific purpose devices. And it will be ambient. At least in my home, you just child something at someone, and there's always like one of these speakers close enough. And so you start behaving differently. It's as if you have the internet ambiently around you and you can ask it things.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel really good about the fact that you could have interpreted that as people have no attention span anymore. They don't want to listen to things. They're not interested in deeper stories are getting dumber. But then podcasts came along and it's almost like, no, no, the need still existed. But maybe it was the fact that you're not prepared to look at your phone like this for two hours. But if you can drive at the same time, it seems like people really want to dig deeper and they want to hear like the more complicated versions. So to me, that is very inspiring that podcast is actually long form. It gives me a lot of hope for humanity, that people seem really interested in hearing deeper, more complicated conversations.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think one of the things that is inspiring for our teams to work on podcast is exactly that whether you think I probably do that it's something biological about perceiving to be in the middle of the conversation that makes you listen in a different way. It doesn't really matter. People seem to perceive it differently. And there was this narrative for a long time that if you look at video, everything kind of in the foreground, it got shorter and shorter and shorter because of financial pressures and monetization and so forth. And eventually at the end there's almost like 20 seconds clipped people just screaming something.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough, I hope people on one of these services. Actually, whether it's Spotify or Amazon or Apple or YouTube, and hopefully enough creators that you can actually start working with a format again. And that excites me. I think being able to change these constraints from 100 years, that could really do something interesting. I really hope it's not just going to be the iteration on the same thing for the next 10 to 20 years as well.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standards in the area of mobile carriers. You have the SMS, the 140 character, 120 SMS. And it was great because everyone agreed on the standard. So as a consumer, you got a lot of distributions and interoperability, but it was a very constrained format. And when the industry wanted to add pictures to that format to do the MMS, I looked it up and I think it took from the late 80s to early 2000s. This is like a 15-20 year product cycle to bring pictures into that. Now once that entire value chain of creation and consumption got wrapped in one software stack within something like Snapchat or WhatsApp, like the first week they added disappearing messages. Like then two weeks later, they added stories. The pace of innovation when you're on one software stack and you can affect both creation and consumption, I think it's going to be rapid. So with these streaming services, we now for the first time in history have”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that music and for that matter audio, podcast audiobook Think it's one of the few core human needs. Think there was no good reason to me why it shouldn't be at the scale of something like messaging or social networking. I don't think it's a niche thing to listen to music or news or something. So I think scale is obviously one of the things that I really hope for. I think, I hope that it's going to be. Billions of users. I hope eventually everyone in the world gets access to all the world's music ever made. So obviously I think it's going to be a much bigger business, otherwise we wouldn't be betting this big. Now if you look more at how it is consumed What I'm hoping is back to this analogy of the software tool chain where I think sometimes internally I make this analogy to text messaging. Text messaging was also based on”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went after just the premium part without the free part and ran into a wall where no one wanted to pay. Some people went after just music should be free, just ads, which doesn't give you enough revenue and doesn't work for the music industry. So I think that combination is kind of opaque from the outside. So maybe I shouldn't say it here and reveal the secret, but... That turns out to be hard to replicate than you would think.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the answer is that there's no magical reason because I don't believe in magic. But I think there are reasons. And I think some of them are that. People have misunderstood a lot of what we actually do. The actual Spotify model is very complicated. They've looked at the premium model and said it seems like you can charge 999 for music and people are going to pay. But that's not what happened. Actually, when we launched the original mobile product, everyone said they would never pay. What happened was they started on the free product. And then their engagement grew so much that eventually they said maybe it is worth $9.99, right? It's your propensity to pay gross with your engagement. So we had a super complicated business model where you operate two different business models, advertising and pre-met at the same time. And I think that is hard to replicate. I struggle to think of other companies that run large scale advertising and subscription products at the same time. So I think the business model is actually much more complicated than people think it is. And so some people...”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, I think a lot of it comes down to honestly Daniel and his tenacity in negotiating, which seems like an impossible discipline task because he was completely unknown and so forth. But maybe that was also the reason that it worked. I think Yeah, I think Game 3 is probably the best way to think about it. You could go straight for this Nash equilibrium that someone is going to defect, or you played many times and you try to actually go for the top left, the corporation cell.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's really like playing theory. If you play To play the game many times, then you can have the statistical outcome that you bet on. And it feels very painful when you're in the middle of that thing.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all beautiful and very important. Exactly. They've taken a lot of risks and certainly it's been frustrating on both sides. They've done a lot of”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If music doesn't get really big, if lots of people do not want to listen to music and want to pay for it, Spotify has no business model. So we actually are incredibly aligned. Other companies not to be tenants, but other companies have other business models where even if they make new music, no money from music, they'd still be profitable companies. But Spotify won't. So I think the industry sees that we are actually aligned business-wise. So there is this trust that allows us to do product development even if it's scary taking risks. The free model itself was an incredible risk for the music industry to take, that they should get credit for. Now, some of it was that they had nothing to lose in Sweden, but frankly, a lot of the labels also took risk.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have taken the painful approach. Some of our competition at the time, they kind of looked at other companies and said, if we just ignore the rights, we get really big, really fast. We're going to be too big for the labels to big to fail. They're not going to kill us. We didn't take that approach. We went legal from day one and we negotiated and negotiated and negotiated. It was very slow. It was very frustrating. We were angry at seeing other companies taking shortcuts and seeming to get away with it. It was this game theory thing where over many rounds of playing the game, this would be the right strategy. And even though clearly there's a lot of frustrations at times during renegotiations, there is this weird trust where we have been honest and fair. We've never screwed them. They've never screwed us. It's tenuous, but there's this trust in they know that”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was a complicated model to get across, but time helped with that, right? And now the revenues to the music industry actually are bigger again than it's gone through this incredible dip and now they're back up. And so we're very busy proud of having been a part of that. So there have been distinct problems. I think when it comes to the labels,”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, most people were pirating, but for the people who bought a download or a CD, the artists would get all the revenue for all the future plays then, right? So you got it all up front, whereas the streaming model was almost nothing they won, almost nothing day two. And then at some point this curve of incremental revenue would intersect with your day one payment. And that took a long time to play out before the music labels, they understood that, but on the artist side, it took a lot of time to understand that actually if I have a big hit that is going to be played for many years, this is a much better model because I get paid based on how much people use the product, not how much they thought they would use it day one or so forth.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been a few distinct challenges. I think, as I said, one of the things that made it work at all was that Sweden and the Nordics was a lost market. So there was no risk for labels to try this. I don't think it would have worked if the market was healthy. So that was the initial condition. Then we had this tremendous challenge with the model itself.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a beautiful description Herding Rich Cats. Yeah, I've never heard that before It is very complicated, and I think certainly actually betting against Spotify has been statistically a very smart thing to do. Just looking at the line of roadkill in music streaming services, it's kind of, I think if I had understood the complexity when I joined Spotify, unfortunately I didn't know enough about the music industry to understand the complexities because then I would have made a more rational guess that it wouldn't work. So, you know, ignorance is bliss. But I think”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is really complicated. But this is exactly why we built our own NLU so that we actually can make personalized guesses because this is the biggest frustration. From a user point of view, they don't understand about ASRs and NBEST lists and business deals. They're like, how hard can it be? I've told this thing 50 times, this version, and still it plays the wrong thing. It can't be hard So we try to take the user approach. If the user is not going to understand the complications of business, we have to solve it.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A complicated thing where you want to be able. So, first of all, you want to be very careful with your user's data. You don't want to share your user's data without the permission, but you want to share some data so that their experience gets better, so that these partners can understand enough, but not too much and so forth. So it's really the trick is that it's like a business driven relationship where you're doing product development across companies together.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we default to the right version, but you actually want to be able to do the cover for the person that just played the cover 50 times or Spotify is just going to seem stupid. So you want to be able to leverage the personalization, but you have this stack where you have the ASR and this thing called the NBS list or the NBS guesses here, and then the precision comes in at the end. You actually want the personalization to be here when you're guessing about what they actually meant. So we're working with these partners and it's a complicated...”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good and complicated question, some of which is dependent on the The partner, so it's hard to comment on the specifics, but the question is the right one. The challenge is if you can't use any other personalization, I mean, we know which stairway to heaven. And the truth is maybe for one person, it is exactly the cover that they want. And they'd be very frustrated if a place”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then try to optimize for where there is actually lower friction and try to, it's kind of like the test autopilot thing. You have to be at the level where you're helpful. If you're too smart and just in the way people are going to get frustrated.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think you see that in the data while it's tremendously successful, the most common interactions are play pause. And, you know, next. The things where if you compare it to taking up your phone, unlocking it, bringing up the app and skipping. Clicking skip. It was much lower friction. But then for longer, more complicated things, like, can you find me that song? People still bring up their phone and search and then play it on their speaker. So we tried again to build a fault tolerant UI where for the more complicated things, you can still pick up your phone, have powerful full keyboard search.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interactive access to the internet in the home. But I still think that the biggest use case for those will be audio. So for that reason, we're investing heavily in it. And we built our own NLU stack to be able to, the challenge here is how do you innovate in that world? It lowers friction for consumers, but it's also much more constrained. You have no pixels to play with in an audio-only world. It's really the vocabulary that is the interface. So we started investing and playing around quite a lot with that, trying to understand what the future will be of you speaking and gesturing and waving at your music”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just added a camera to it where when the alarm goes off, instead of saying, hey, Google, stop, you can just wave your hand. So I think they're going to think more of it as an agent or as an assistant, truly an assistant and an assistant that can see you is going to be much more effective than a blind assistant. So I think these things will morph and we won't necessarily think of them as quote unquote voice speakers anymore.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many years ago, back when we started using Sonos, if you went through all the trouble of setting up your Sonos system, you had this magical experience where you had all the music ever made in your living room. And we made this assumption that the home, everyone used to have a CD player at home, but they never managed to get their files working in the home. Having this network attached storage was too cumbersome for most consumers. So we made the assumption that the home would skip from the CD all the way to streaming books where you would get, you would buy the steering and would have all the music built in. That took longer than we thought. But with the voice speakers, that was the unlocking that made kind of the connected speaker happen in the home. So it really exploded and we saw this engagement that we predicted would happen. What I think is interesting though is where it's going from now. Right now you think of them as voice speakers, but I think if you look at Google I.O., for example,”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we see in our data is that the number one use case for these speakers is music, music and podcast. So fortunately for us, it's been important to these companies to have those use case covered. So they wanted Spotify on this. We have very good relationships with them. And we're seeing tremendous success with them. What I think is interesting about them is it's already working. We kind of had this epiphany.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a few things Say about the first of all, it's incredibly exciting. They're growing like crazy, especially here in the US. And Solving a consumer need that I think is, you can think of it as Remote interactivity. You can control this thing from across the room. And it may feel like a small thing, but it turns out that friction matters to consumers. Being able to say, play pause and so forth from across the room is very powerful. So basically you made the living room interactive now.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then back off if you say that's not good enough. But I think it's interesting to figure out what your mental model is if Spotify is an AI that you talk to, which I think might be a bit too abstract for many consumers, or if you still think of it as it's my music app, but it's just more helpful.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're playing around with that, with kind of the thumbs up concept, saying, I really like this, just kind of talking to the algorithm. It's unclear if that's the best way for humans to interact. Maybe it is. Maybe they should think of Spotify as a person, an agent sitting there trying to serve you, and you can say bad Spotify, good Spotify. Right now, the analogy we've had is more You shouldn't think of us. We should be invisible. And the feedback is if you save it, kind of you work for yourself. You do a playlist because you think is great and we can learn from that. It's kind of back to Tesla, how they kind of have this shadow mode. They sit and watch you drive. We kind of took the same analogy. We sit in what you playlist. And then maybe we can offer you an autopilot where you can take over for a while or something like that.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of noisy, but quite fast feedback. And so you can see if people played through or if the, which is the inverse of skip really, that's an important signal. On the other hand, much of the consumption happens when your phone is in your pocket, maybe you're running or driving or you're playing on a speaker. And so you not skipping doesn't mean that you love that song. It might be that it wasn't bad enough that you would walk up and skip. So it's a noisy signal. Then we have the equivalent of the like, which is you save it to your library. That's a pretty strong signal of affection. And then we have the more explicit signal of playlisting. Like you took the time to create a playlist, you put it in there. There's a very little small chance that if you took all that trouble, this is not a really important track to you. And then we understand also what are the tracks it relates to. So we have the playlisting, we have the like, and then we have the listening or skip. And you have to have very different approaches to all of them because”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we have a few signals that are important. Obviously, playing through. So one of the benefits of music actually, even compared to podcast or movies, is the object itself is really only about three minutes. So you get a lot of chances to recommend. And the feedback loop is every three minutes instead of every two hours or something. So you actually get...”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was this thing of taking discovery packaging it into a playlist and saying that these are new tracks that we think you might like based on this and setting the right expectation made it a great product. So I think we have this benefit that for example Tesla doesn't have that we can we can we can change the expectation we can we can build a fault tolerant setting. It's very hard to be fault tolerant when you're driving at a you know 100 miles per hour or something and and we we have the luxury of being able to say that of being wrong if we have the right UI, which gives us different abilities to take more risk. So I actually think the self-driving problem is much harder.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a great point. And it's back to the product development. You could try to spend a few years trying to predict which mood you're in automatically when you open Spotify or you create a tab which is happy and sad, right? And you're going to be right 100% of the time with one click. Now it's probably much better to let the user tell you if they're happier or sad or if they want to work out. On the other hand, if your user interface become 2000 tabs, you're introducing so much friction to no one will use the product. So then you have to get better. So it's this thing where I think maybe it was, I don't remember who coined it, but it's called fault tolerant UIs, right? You build a UI that is tolerant to being wrong. And then you can be much less right in your algorithms. So we've had to learn a lot of that. Building the right UI that fits where the machine learning is. And a great discovery there, which was by the teams during one of our hacks.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in theory embeddings isn't that complicated, the fact that you try to find some principal components or something like that, dimensionality reduction and so forth. So the theory, I guess, is easy. The practice is very, very hard. And it's a huge engineering challenge. But fortunately, we have some amazing both research and engineering teams in this space.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core assumption is that there are patterns in almost everything. And if there are patterns, these embedding techniques are getting better and better now as everyone else. We're also using kind of deep embeddings where you can encode binary values and so forth. And what I think is interesting is this process to try to find things that Do not necessarily, you wouldn't actually have guessed. So it is very hard in an engineering sense to find the right dimensions. It's an incredible scalability problem to do for hundreds of millions of users and to update it every day.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is very hard in the sense that you need a lot of data. And I think what we found was that, so it's not a stationary problem. It changes over time. And so We've gone through the journey of if you've done a lot of computer vision, obviously I've done a bunch of computer vision in my past. And we started kind of with the handcrafted heuristics for, you know, this is kind of in the music. This is this. And if you consume this, you probably like this. So we have, we started there and we have some of that still. Then what was interesting about the playlist data was that you could find these latent things that wouldn't necessarily even make sense to you that could even capture maybe cultural references because they co-occurred things that wouldn't have appeared kind of mechanistically either in the content or so forth. I think that”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a lot of it may not be in the structure of the song or the title. It could be cultural references because, you know, it was a historic. So the definition problems quickly get. And I think that was the insight of Andrew Eng when he said that job of the product manager is to understand these things that algorithms don't. And then define what that looks like. And then you have something to train towards, right? Then you have kind of the test set. And then so today the editors create this pool of tracks and then we personalize. You could easily imagine that once you have this set, you could have some automatic exploration on the rest of the catalog because then you understand what it is.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think machine learning is great at replicating patterns. You have the patterns, but if you try to write me a spec of what song's greatest song to sing in the card definition is, is it loud? Does it have many choruses? Should it have been in movies? It quickly gets incredibly complicated, right? Yeah.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They create the framing, the image, the title, and they create a test set. They create a group of songs, like a few thousand songs out of the catalog that they manually curate that are known songs that are great to sing in the car. And they can take two romance into account, they understand things that our algorithms do not at all. So they have this huge set of tracks. Then when we deliver that to you, we look at your taste vectors and you get the 20 tracks that are songs to sing in the car in your taste. So you have personalization and editorial input in the same process. That makes sense”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paid expert that we have that's really good at something like soul hip hop EDM something right there are true experts no everyone in the industry so they have all the cultural knowledge you think of them as the product manager and you you say that let's say that you want to create a you think that there's a there there's a product need in the world for something like songs to sing in the car or songs to sing in the shower i'm taking that example because it exists people love to scream songs in the car when they drive right So, you want to create that product, then you have this product manager who's a musical expert. They come up with a concept. I think this is a missing thing in humanity, like a playlist called Song Sitting in the Car.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Per hour for every user that logs in. So the algo may be not as sophisticated but much more efficient. So there was this contradiction. But then a few years ago, we started. Focusing on this kind of human in the loop thinking around machine learning. And we actually coined an internal term for it called algatorial, a combination of algorithms and editors where if we take a concrete example, you think of the editor, this”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think one thing that I think is interesting is. We invested quite heavily in editorial, in people creating playlists using statistical data that was successful for us. And then we also invested in machine learning. And for the longest time within Spotify and within the rest of the industry, there was always this narrative of humans versus the machine. Algo versus editorial. And editors would say like, well, if I had that data, if I could see your playlisting history and I made a choice for you, I would have made a better choice. And they would have because they're much smarter than these algorithms. Human is incredibly smart compared to our algorithms. They can take culture into account and so forth. The problem is that they can't make 200 million decisions.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes sense. And then the radio product, the stations product, is one of these click play, put it in your pocket for hours.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so then you can be quite adventurous in the recommendations you do. But if we have another product called Daily Mix, which kind of implies that these are only going to be your favorites. So if you have one out of 10 that is good and nine out of 10 that doesn't work for you, you're going to think it's a horrible product. So actually a lot of the product development we learned over the years is about setting the right expectations. So for daily mix algorithmically, we would pick among things that feel very safe in your taste space. Whereas Discover Weekly, we go kind of wild because the expectation is most of this is not going to. So a lot of that, a lot of to answer your question there, a lot of should you let the user pick or not? It depends. We have some products where the whole point is that the user can click play, put the phone in the pocket, and it should be really good music for like an hour. We have other products where you probably need to say like, no, no, save, no, no. And it's very interactive.”
2019-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source