Gustav Soderstrom: Spotify | Lex Fridman Podcast #29

1. 0:00 – 1:44:25

   Intro

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Gustav Soderström. He's the chief research and development officer at Spotify, leading their product, design, data, technology, and engineering teams. As I've said before in my research and in life in general, I love music, listening to it and creating it, and using technology, especially personalization through machine learning to enrich the music discovery and listening experience. That is what Spotify has been doing for years, continually innovating, defining how we experience music as a society in the digital age. That's what Gustav and I talk about among many other topics, including our shared appreciation of the movie True Romance, in my view, one of the great movies of all time. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now here's my conversation with Gustav Soderström. Spotify has over 50 million songs in its catalog, so let me ask the all-important question, I feel like you're the right person to ask, what is the definitive greatest song of all time?

   2. GSGustav Soderstrom1:19

      (laughs) It varies for me, personally.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:24

      So you can't speak definitively for everyone?

   4. GSGustav Soderstrom1:26

      (laughs) I wouldn't believe very much in machine learning if I did, right?

   5. LFLex Fridman1:31

      Okay.

   6. GSGustav Soderstrom1:31

      Because it meant everyone had the same taste.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:34

      So for you, what is... you have to pick, what is the song?

   8. GSGustav Soderstrom1:38

      All right, so it's, it's pretty easy for me. There is this song called "You're So Cool" by Hans Zimmer, uh, soundtrack to True Romance.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:47

      Ah.

   10. GSGustav Soderstrom1:47

       It was a movie that made a big impression on me and it's kind of been following me through my life. Actually had it play at my wedding. I sat with the organist and helped him play it on an organ, which was a pretty, pretty interesting experience. It's, uh...

   11. LFLex Fridman2:01

       That is probably my, uh, I would say top three movie of all time. Yeah, it's just an incredible movie.

   12. GSGustav Soderstrom2:08

       Yeah, and, and it came out during my formative years and, uh, as I've discovered in music, you, you shape your music taste during those years, so it definitely affected me quite a bit.

   13. LFLex Fridman2:18

       Did it affect you in any other kind of way?

   14. GSGustav Soderstrom2:21

       Well, the movie itself affected me back then, it was a big part of culture. I didn't really adopt any characters from the movie-

   15. LFLex Fridman2:27

       (laughs)

   16. GSGustav Soderstrom2:27

       ... but it was a, it was a great story of love, some fantastic actors and, and, you know, really I didn't even know who Hans Zimmer was at the time, but fantastic music. And so, um, that song has followed me, and the movie actually has followed me throughout my life.

   17. LFLex Fridman2:44

       That was Quentin Tarantino actually, I think, uh, director, directed or produced that, or... So it's not Stairway to Heaven or Bohemian Rhapsody, it's, uh...

   18. GSGustav Soderstrom2:52

       Tho- those are, those are great. They're not my personal favorites, but, uh-

   19. LFLex Fridman2:55

       But they're out there.

   20. GSGustav Soderstrom2:55

       I've realized that people have different tastes and that's, uh, that's a big part of, of what we do.

   21. LFLex Fridman3:00

       Well, for me, I would have to stick with Stairway to Heaven. So 35,000 years ago, I looked this up on Wikipedia, flute-like instruments started being used in caves as part of hunting rituals, in primitive cultural gatherings, things like that. This is the birth of music. Since then, we had a, a few folks, Beethoven, Elvis, Beatles, Justin Bieber of course, Drake. So in your view, let's start like high-level philosophical, what is the purpose of music on this planet of ours?

   22. GSGustav Soderstrom3:36

       I think music has many different purposes. I think there is, um, there is certainly a big purpose which is the same as much of entertainment, which is escapism and to be able to live in some sort of other mental state for a while. But I also think you have the, the opposite of escaping, which is to help you focus on something you are actually doing. And so I think people use music as a tool to, to tune the brain to the activities that they are actually doing and, um, it's kind of like, in one sense maybe it's the roost signal. If you, if you think about the brain as neural networks, it's maybe the most efficient hack we can do to actually actively tune it into some state that you want to be. And you can do it in other ways, you can tell stories to put people in a certain mood, but music is probably very effective to get you through a certain mood very fast, I think.

   23. LFLex Fridman4:28

       You know, there's a, there's a social component historically to music, where people listen to music together. I was just thinking about this, that to me, and you mentioned machine learning, but to me personally, music is a really private thing. Like, I'm speaking for myself, I listen to music... like almost nobody knows the kind of things I have in my library except people who are really close to me, and they really only know a certain percentage. There's like some weird stuff that I'm almost probably embarrassed b- by, right?

   24. GSGustav Soderstrom5:01

       It's called the guilty pleasures, right? Everyone has them.

   25. LFLex Fridman5:03

       (laughs) The guilty pleasures, yeah. Hopefully they're not too bad. But, uh, so it's a, I- for me it's personal. Do you think of music as something that's social or as something that's personal? Or does it vary?

   26. GSGustav Soderstrom5:16

       So I think it's the same, it's the same answer, that you use it for, for both. We- we've thought a lot about this during these 10 years at Spotify obviously. In one sense, as you said, music is incredibly social. You go to concerts and so forth. On the other hand, it is your, your escape, and everyone has these things that are very personal to them. So what we've found is that when it comes to, to, um... M- most people claim that they have a friend or two that they are heavily inspired by and that they listen to, so I actually think music is very social, but in a smaller group setting. It's an, it's an intimate form of...... of, um, it's an intimate relationship. It's not something that you necessarily share broadly. Now at concerts, you can argue you do. But then you've gathered a lot of people that you have something in common with. I think this broadcast sharing of music, um, is something we tried, uh, on social networks and so forth. But it turns out that people aren't super interested in just what their friends listen to.

   27. LFLex Fridman6:27

       Mm-hmm.

   28. GSGustav Soderstrom6:28

       Um, they're interested in understanding if they have something in common, perhaps, with a friend, but not, you know, not just as, as information.

   29. LFLex Fridman6:35

       Right. That's, that, that's really interesting. I, I was just thinking of it this morning listening to Spotify. I really have a pretty intimate relationship with Spotify, with my playlists, right? I've had them for many years now and they've grown with me together. There's, there's an intimate, uh, relationship you have with a library of music that you've developed. And we'll talk about different ways we can play with that. Can you, uh, do the impossible task and try to give a history of music listening from your perspective, from before the internet and after the internet. And just kinda everything leading up to streaming on Spotify and so on.

   30. GSGustav Soderstrom7:18

       I'll try. It could be a 100-year podcast, but... (laughs)

Episode duration: 1:47:03