Okay. If everyone can find their seats, we're going to go on to our next fireside chat. Good afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome Gustav Söderström, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Spotify, to our Communacopia and Technology Conference, his first investor conference in that role. For those of you who haven't met him before, Gustav is an engineer by training and a founder by instinct. He built Kenet Works, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2006, and 13th Lab, an augmented reality startup acquired by Oculus.
He joined Spotify in 2009, spent the next 15 years as Chief Product and Technology Officer. In that time, he called the mobile shift early, bet on machine learning more than a decade ago, and helped transform a music app into the place where nearly 800 million people listen and watch podcasts and books as well. He became Co-President in 2023 and stepped into the Co-Chief Executive Officer role alongside Alex Norström this January. Gustav, welcome to the stage at Communacopia.
Thank you. Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it.
I always love welcoming people to their first Communacopia and Technology Conference. Thanks so much for taking the time to do it. I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. This is exciting.
Let's start with the future and the technology shifts that are underway. You've been a key architect of Spotify's evolution through a number of technology shifts. Drawing on that experience, how are you thinking about Spotify positioning itself for where the industry landscape is going over the medium to long term?
Yeah. The way I think about technology shifts, often called macro waves, that's what we talk about internally, is that in times of no change, market shares tend to stay stable. In times of change is where you have opportunity. Spotify was born out of one of these opportunities. It was the shift to low latency, high bandwidth broadband. This is why Spotify could start in Sweden, because Sweden, fortunately for us, happened to have that before everyone else.
It was one of these technology shifts that enabled Spotify. Spotify grew. We had our desktop and mobile proposition, and then the smartphone happened, and it was a big change. It was scary, but the outcome was that Spotify figured out how to reposition itself for this age, and once we did, we started growing very quickly. Then the connected home happened. We figured out we'd connect, and we started riding that macro wave, or surfing the wave, riding the tailwind.
Yeah.
This is how I think about AI and where we are right now. The job for me and Alex, the other Co-Chief Executive Officer, is to be able to understand technology deeply, try to understand what it means for Spotify, for the business model, reposition the company to turn it into a tailwind, and then ride it. I always tell everyone, I have been at Spotify for almost 18 years now, and I have not had this much fun since the smartphone, because now everything is changing. Now there is opportunity to do something, to get bigger, to raise your ambition, and to increase market shares.
Well, let us build on that last answer, because you guys as a team hosted an investor day just a couple of months ago in May. You laid out a lot of key strategic priorities that are anchoring the business going forward. How would you frame those key priorities and how you are thinking about the execution roadmap ahead for the companies when measured against those priorities?
Yeah. Alex and I, obviously, we have seen this AI wave coming, but everyone sees it coming. The interesting question is, what does it mean? What we saw happening, we saw a few things happening a few years ago, and we had a few answers to what it would mean. One thing that it would mean would be that for the first time in history, computers would start to speak English. There was about one million people globally who could speak to computers, they were called developers on GitHub. It has been evident for some time that anyone will be able to instruct a computer, and today you can do that. We realized that all 8 billion of us are going to be able to talk to computers. The question then is, what does that mean for consumer services?
We started rebuilding Spotify to be the first truly intelligent media service. We could see consumers sitting there with ChatGPT over here, basically AGI, and then over here with a media service that at least a few years ago was dumb as a rock. That is not going to last. Of course, you are going to want to be able to talk to your media service the way you could talk to ChatGPT. Previously, when a consumer heard a song on Spotify, if you go back a few years, they might say, "This is a great song. Now I want to see the music video." Have to go to YouTube to do that. That is not great for us. Today, you have all the music videos on Spotify. But you may also say, like, "Who is this? What is this band? Who is it?
When are they touring?" All of those questions where we sent them away. Now we rebuilt Spotify, so you ask all of those questions to Spotify right there, and it tells you who the band is, who the drummer was, who produced the song, when they're touring, where they're touring. It has both all of our proprietary information that we've licensed or bought, even who you sampled this song from. But you also have access to all the world information of what people are doing right now. So we created a new vision for the consumer product, and we think we were early with that, and we think right now we're quite far ahead in the capabilities that Spotify has and what you can ask it to do. So that was one change.
The other thing that happened was that because more and more features would start using AI and inference, the internet would start going from what has for the longest time been a fixed cost amortization business into a marginal cost business. What I mean with that is, since before software, since Silicon Valley has been about fixed cost upfront investment amortization, and then after Silicon, software had the same dynamics. This is now changing. Now you're starting to have marginal cost per user in terms of inference. So we looked at this and said, "This could be a challenge and a headwind for companies like Spotify. Let's turn it into a tailwind." Fortunately for Spotify, we're one of the few companies that always had marginal cost. We've always had per-stream fees in the free tier. If we had grown too quickly through our journey, we could have gone bankrupt.
So we were never fortunate enough to just let growth run wild and then monetize later. We had to grow and monetize. So we developed a lot of discipline in this genre over the years. Alex and I looked at this and we said, "How can we turn this into an opportunity?" At Investor Day, in May, we presented this power law, and it's been true forever that usage of services is not a linear curve, it's a power law. We have a long tail of users that use the service a little, and you have people who use it more and more. But then you have head, who do not use it twice as much. They use it literally 10 times as much. Now, if you think about having marginal costs. In a fixed cost environment, those 10X users, they don't matter that much.
It was just the upfront software cost. If you have marginal costs, now these 10X users will cost you 10X as much. So you have to have a business model that supports this, or you're just going to have to cut them off and ship them off the service. We had started another business a few years ago called Audiobooks, and Audiobooks has that same dynamic. We have some amount of cost per listening hour. So what we did was, we put a large amount, about 15 hours of audiobooks listening into Premium. An amazing offer. The average audiobook is only seven hours. So for most consumers, this is all they can listen to in a month. This was very well-received. The Audiobooks business is growing like crazy right now. But you have these power users who did not want 15 hours. They wanted 100 hours.
So we created add-ons for them, where you can buy additional hours. We were very hopeful that this would work well, but it worked much better than we thought. This add-on is already on EUR 100 million ARR after only about a year. Very encouraged by this. We said, "This is the model for inference-based products as well." We put a bunch of inference into the free tier. We put more inference into the paid tier, but we control how much. We control our margin. The margin is a managed outcome. If you want more Spotify, instead of saying, "No. Go away. Go somewhere else. Go to a competitor," we say, "Sure. You can pay for more. You can pay for as much more as you want." This is how we think about our business now. We have a free tier that maximizes the opportunity, right?
I think all subscription businesses eventually are going to have a free tier. We were just early to that. If you want to maximize the opportunity. We think the TAM for music is literally 8 billion people. If you want to maximize that, you need a free tier. Then we have one of the world's largest subscription tiers, which lets us use bundle economics to enter new areas, audiobooks, et cetera. But what we didn't have until this spring was the ability to also monetize the rest of this power law, the head, which we now do with add-ons, with audiobooks, with inference add-ons, and several other add-ons that are coming along the way. So we feel that this is the right business model for a modern company in the age of AI. You need to let users buy as much as they want of your service.
Okay. Against that, it's probably a question I get a fair bit from investors as well is: how do you see your own competitive positioning in the audio landscape? When you think about some of the growth opportunities you laid out at Investor Day, how do you think you could possibly change the positioning you have competitively and build even larger amounts of scale around the business? Mostly tied to engagement is what I thought the messaging was coming out of Investor Day.
Yeah. There are a few different dimensions that we can compete on. As I said, the business model itself is one competitive advantage.
Yeah.
The freemium business model that we now added add-ons to. We can both play with growth, we can play with price raise of the Premium tier, but we can also play with finding niche audiences that have much higher ARPU, like audiobook listeners, heavy AI users, other things that are coming up. This is one dimension. The other dimension that we've been playing with is to add more verticals. We went into podcasts because we saw that there was a lot of engagement there, but no one was really innovating on product. We went in there and we became market leaders. Then we saw audiobooks, which we also thought was a great fit for Spotify. If you look at the Scandinavian countries where I come from, audiobooks is not a niche feature, it's a mass feature, which is why we put it into Premium.
We are going to go into more and more verticals, and one of the things that we think is unique about Spotify versus many other consumer apps, is that most consumer apps, you take a video app, that's a use case. It's a situation. Spotify is not a use case. Spotify is your studying, your running, your dinner with friends, your car commute. We're everywhere. We have so many use cases to go into. One that I'm very passionate about, for example, is fitness. Almost everyone uses Spotify when they're running and when they're in the gym. We think we have the brand promise to go into many more areas than other brands.
Many people look at Spotify and say, like, "Okay, maybe they have three verticals, music, podcasts, and audiobooks, but how many more can there be?" We think there are many. We think our brand is strong enough and has enough elasticity for a lot of areas, and we think we're already in those use cases. The last thing I would say is, Alex and I, we look at others, we try to learn from the best, but you would like to have your own strategy, right?
Yeah.
You would like to be differentiated. One of the bets that we made, that we talked a lot about at Investor Day, was that it's clear that short-form videos is eating enormous amounts of engagement. It's very effective. It monetizes advertising extremely well. You have an ad break, like every 30 seconds. It's also very addictive, and it's also true that most of the consumers regret most of the time they spend on these services.
This is not something I made up. What we did was we asked someone to survey our user base, 50% our user base, 50% non-Spotify user base. They asked across all the big services. All of them. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, TikTok, all of them. Two questions. How much of the time you spend do you regret? How much of the time you spend do you value? Which is the same question asked two ways just to control for the answer.
Yeah
What turned out in this survey, which we talked about, was that Spotify was the lowest regret content on the internet, at least in this group. So people regret less than 10% of the time they spend on Spotify, and conversely, they value more than 90%. This is not true for most of the other services. Some of them, people regret up to 70% of the time they spend. This was an insight for us. I previously thought that, I have kids of my own, when they sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll, my view was that they're probably trapped and they love it. Turns out, no, they're trapped and they know it, and they don't like it. They hate it. We decided to turn this into a strategy.
Because we were the lowest regret, we said we are going to be the lowest regret or the most valuable time spent on the internet. Why is that a good strategy for Spotify? It is because Spotify is still sort of 90% subscription revenue. If we were 90% advertising revenue, going after max engagement would probably have been the best strategy, and it probably is for some of those companies. But if you're 90% subscription, you should maximize for subscription retention. So the question is, at the end of the month, when a user decides if they want to pay again—
Yeah
when they vote with a wallet, what do they ask themselves? Do they ask themselves, like, where was my max engagement? Where did I scroll the longest? No, they don't. They ask themselves, do I regret the time I spent, or do I feel good about it? So that's what we're trying to maximize. I think that's differentiated both subjectively, because I haven't seen anyone else say it, but also structurally, because if most of your monetization is from ads, it's going to be very expensive to follow. Does that make sense?
Does indeed, yeah. Really interesting. Okay. Let's come back to the analyst day for a second, because you through the investor day, you threw out some targets around where you want to go over the next couple of years out to 2030, thinking about mid-teens growth, gross margin ranges, and 20% or better operating margin. When you guys think about all that you want to accomplish over the next four or five years, how do you think about striking the right balance between investing in growth, making sure you capture the growth opportunity that sits in front of you, but also delivering on that margin trajectory?
Yeah. I think what is nice about Spotify, I'm sure you've heard of the Lindy effect. What has happened before is very likely to happen more. Spotify has almost 20 years of the Lindy effect. What I like about this is sometimes when I talk to investors, I say the following. Actually, I'm sort of paraphrasing Alex Norström here. We have something like between 3% and 4% of the world's population paying us every month today for subscriptions. If you look at a market like Sweden, 50% of the population are paying for Spotify. That's a percentage of and that includes babies and the elderly. You could imagine that the conversion percentage is very high.
Yeah.
It doesn't stop. It just keeps going up. We have never seen it stop. Conversion has never stalled out in any market, right? You say to yourself, maybe Spotify won't convert 70%, 80%, 90% of the world to premium, but is it unreasonable that we would convert 15% of the world? Then you have a 5x story already. The question is, what do you have to believe to believe in a 5x story? The truth is just more of the same. Spotify started in Sweden. There were zero paid users. It's gone from 0% to very, very high percentages. This is true for every market. Conversion is a function of time. The longer you stay in the market, the longer conversion goes up. Spotify has something like 40%-ish conversion on average, but that average doesn't exist.
It's a blend of super high conversion where we've been for a long time, lower conversion where we're nascent. For the longest time, people said, "Okay, I buy that Sweden converts well, but Swedes are different." Then it worked in Scandinavia, and they said, "Well, I buy that Scandinavians are different, but it will never work in Europe." Then it worked in Europe and people said, "But never in the U.K., right? That's a different market." Guess what? It worked in the U.K. Then we came to America and people said, "Well, not America. Surely, it's the world's biggest music market." Same story. Then they said, "Okay. But never, ever in Latin America, right? Cannot be." Guess what? Exact same story. We're converting like crazy in Latin America. Now they're saying, "But what about India?
It can't be true, right?" Of course, it's going to be true. It's going to be true for Africa as well. So really what you have to believe is just more of the same, which I think is a very good base. Alex and I are not content with saying, we're just going to do the same thing for another 20 years. But it is important to know that you don't have to believe more than just the same for a few more years for Spotify to get, and the music industry, to get many X bigger. On top of that, we are going to do a lot more. As I said, we're going into more and more verticals.
Yeah.
We are trying to become something very different for consumers, a truly intelligent media service. What we said at Investor Day is we're going from passive single-player services to interactive multiplayer services. What do we mean with that? Well, multiplayer means we have a feature called Jam, that has over 50 million users, where you play music together in the same room, but also remotely. This means that if you're in college, it matters which music service you have. You have to be on Spotify or you can't be at the party. So we think multiplayer network effects are very important, especially at our scale. But we also think interactivity is very important. Spotify started as a pretty passive consumption service. The thing you did, though, was you curated playlists. That was very valuable for Spotify. Users helped tell us, these songs go well together in the playlist.
That was the basis for our machine learning. What they're doing now since a year back, since we added mixing, is they're not saying just which tracks go together in a playlist. They're also saying how they transition well, exactly in which millisecond. So if you listened to our automatic mixes a year ago, they were okay, but not great. If you listen to them now, they're really good. Why is that? It's because millions of people have told us exactly how these songs go together. So they're curating the catalog for us. Now why are they doing that? It's not because they're working for us. It's because they love to interact with the music. So this is why we're so confident about the thing I'm sure you're going to ask about, covers and remixes.
Yeah.
Using AI to be able to play much more with the music, to take your favorite song and transform it. Not just beat stretch it and do a nice DJ transition, but actually change the whole song, do a remix. We are betting a lot on interactivity. These are some of the questions of how we are planning to grow. I think the baseline is incredibly strong, but the ambition is much higher than baseline.
Okay. That is super interesting, and I do want to come back and go a little bit deeper in some of those topics. Let's end this part of the conversation by, you talked about the way the consumer thinks about your product. You talked about layering in more engagement, more utility, and obviously the conversion theme that we talked a lot about at Investor Day. How do you think about the pricing dynamic around the product longer term? If you are delivering more utility to the consumer, how do you think about pricing elasticity?
Yeah. For the longest time, Spotify held the price at sort of EUR 9.99.
Yep.
Actually, if you then account for inflation, we actually lowered the price. With family plans, the effective price actually went down over time. At the same time, we just poured value into there. More machine learning. The catalog went from, I think, 2 million tracks to 200 million tracks. So more and more value, kept the price the same. So the price-to-value gap increased. Then, a few years ago, we started taking back some of that price, so capturing some of that value.
But the rule that Alex and I have is the value always has to be vastly bigger than the price you are paying. This should be a no-brainer. This should be the best proposition on the internet. But we have now proven several times that we have more value. This is the question, like how much price elasticity do you have? The answer is, what happens when you price it? Do you get churn or not?
Yes.
We do not get churn. We have been very comfortable in these price raises. The second test is, do you dare to price lead? What happens if you are more expensive than your competitors? We are more expensive than our competitors in all markets, and we still do not see the churn. We feel very good about the value we have there, but we are not complacent about it. We have literally a strategy called value and premium, where we are trying to make sure that we always put enormous amounts of value and premiums. All these mixing features I told you about.
Yep.
Free and premium. You do not have to pay for those, right? There are a few levers. One is pricing of the premium tier, where we think we have more room to grow already, but we also keep putting in more value, so that gives us more room to grow. Then, of course, we have the add-ons, where we think we could have much higher, and we do have much higher ARPU for some users. We are going to create more of these add-ons in music and podcasts, in audiobooks, and in other verticals.
Very clear. When you think about the opportunity set you are laying out for AI to transform the industry, how do you think about what you probably want to do, which is being innovative and moving the platform forward, but also recognizing that there is an industry structure, there are relationships in this industry, and bringing the industry along and making sure that the relationships with the industry are fostered and grow alongside while you are trying to build an innovation curve?
Yeah. The way I think about AI is in three different buckets, right? If you think about Spotify and AI, there is productivity, where we could either be the most productive or we could fall behind and be non-productive and non-competitive. There is productivity. Then there is the product proposition, where I just said, I think consumer products will change drastically in the next few years, and we are hell-bent on being the ones that change it. Then there is content, generative content and music. If we actually start with generative media and content, which I think you as investors probably think a lot about because if there was one thing that could be dangerous for a company like Spotify, it should be if the core economics of content somehow shifts. There are hundreds of millions and billions of tracks being created on these generative services.
What is happening today is all music generation is only about net new music. You are only making new music on these services out there. Not on Spotify, we do not do that, but on these other services. Most of these services are sued by the labels. You are making new music there. That is because it is not because they cannot make a remix or a cover, it is because the remix and the covers are copyright protected, so they cannot legally, right? You are making a new song. Spotify has always had the view that for a creator, we do not want to decide, we should not decide what tools they are allowed to use. I think if you look historically, there was a big upheaval when the electric guitar came along, right? It was cheating or different, and then we got rock music.
Then in the 1980s, the synthesizer came along, and clearly people were cheating now. But then we had synth music. Then, close to my heart, in the 1990s, Avicii came along, and because he could not play any instrument or sing, the establishment said, "Well, that is not a real artist," right? Turns out, one of the artists we are the most proud of now. I think of generative music models as tools, and it is a fact that most creators are using these tools to some extent, at least in ideation today. Then the question is, what does that mean for Spotify? Well, to the extent that people are using these tools and creating songs, the way for them to get distribution and monetization is to upload them to Spotify. So we are participating in if there is a hit made, it is very likely to be on Spotify.
In that sense, for an aggregator, the fact that the catalog gets bigger is a positive. But what we think is wrong with this scenario is that AI is now only a story for new creators, and for the existing artists, it is only a story of replacement from here on. What we decided to do is we are seeing that no one is solving the other problem of making remixes and covers for existing IP because it would be too hard for them. They would have to get every artist on earth signed up and start paying out to them. Guess who has every artist on the earth signed up and is paying out to them already? Spotify.
Yeah.
We are in the perfect position to solve this problem. How all the existing artists participate in AI instead of getting replaced by AI. We have taken the laborious path of training our own generative music model, legally, asking for permission slowly and boringly, instead of just running ahead and doing them illegally. It is slower, but we think it is the right thing to do. It is just what we did against piracy.
We did not cheat with piracy. We actually went and licensed all the music. Many labels were hesitant, artists were hesitant, but it was the right thing to do. We are taking the long path, training our own models, which I feel very good about because we have been working on this for some time. The interesting thing is, then we go and get opt-in from the artists who want to participate. We are not forcing artists to participate.
Yeah.
Instead, what we are saying is you probably want to participate because if one of your fans creates a remix of your song, that actually increases the share of the streaming pool that you get. If you are an artist today, from the 1980s or 1990s, the way that you would make more money today is to hope that some other artist would create a remix or cover of your song because then you get more royalties. Now you can hope that all your fans actually create remixes and covers of your songs. The economic incentives are aligned with the artists, and we are not taking anything of that. All those royalties are going to the artists. Even more than if someone made a cover, because then the artist would have had to share the revenue with a-
Yeah
cover maker. You get all of it. The fan does not get anything, we do not take, you just get all of it. The incentives are aligned for artists, but we are not forcing them. We are asking them to opt in. We think this is the way. It is just like with piracy. The way forward is to also make a great product, not try to stop it, but to make a better product that is legal. This is how we are thinking about it. We are very excited about it. We think all existing artists deserve to participate in AI if they want to, but we are not going to force them.
Just following up on that, what signs do you think investors should continue to watch for to see you've had some good industry adoption and agreements struck already, more of the industry coming along for this as a broader theme, and then broadly how it also fits into commercialization longer term as well?
Yeah. So we've had UMG cover modeling sign up. We're making really good progress with them. The thing that has been the most important to me is actually that the tools are really good. I've been working very hard on the models themselves, and I feel very good about where they are right now. The next step for us will be a research preview. Why would we do a research preview? Well, it is because the way these models work is you can train them in private, but then the way they get better is by lots and lots of examples, right?
What we want to do is we want to ask our users for a prompt for a song, then they create a remix, and then we show them two versions, and they say, "This one was better than that one." This is called preference data. Then you can go do what is called reinforcement learning on this preference data.
Yeah.
This is how you win. This is why Anthropic ran away, because they had more users giving them preference data. This is why you have one player that is the best at new music because they got the most users giving the most preference data. The benefit for Spotify is we have the distribution. We have almost 800 million users who could give us preference data. I think structurally, we're both the ones that are best positioned to do this on the payout side, but we're also one of the few companies who could get the preference data for this model to become the best in the world very quickly. So that's the next step. It's already very good, but getting preference data from lots of users is what is going to improve it quickly.
Yeah. Understood. Scale begetting more scale.
Sure.
Understood. You talked earlier about some of the format innovation that's happened on the platform over the last couple of years. Two-parter for me, really. What have you learned the most as you've introduced a wider range of formats on the platform? Specifically, what have you learned as more video has become prevalent on the platform and how that changes user behavior?
Yeah. If we start with video, there were two things that happened for us. One was we went into podcasts when they were audio. Fortunately for us, we did, if you remember, the deal with Joe Rogan, and he-
Yeah
said, "I need to have video." We built video because we needed to, but that gave us a window into consumer behavior, and we saw what was happening, that consumers were actually watching this video and dipping in and out of it, even though most of the consumption is when the phone is in your pocket. Then the rest of the industry, of the podcast industry, just started becoming video very quickly.
Because we were early to that and we saw it, we pivoted and we built out podcast video very quickly, and now we have a very good podcast experience, which is why it's really only us and YouTube that are in this game because the others missed video, if we're going to be honest about it. If you look at video, you see two things. You see a very clear split between audiences, where older people still listen to audio-only podcasts, and younger people, if there's no video, they contact customer support and say, "The podcast is broken. I don't understand why there isn't any images here." They don't have the concept of audio-only anymore.
Yeah.
Right? That's on the podcast side. We were fortunate enough to act on it technically, but then we actually had one more stumbling or one more barrier, which was the monetization. The monetization was much better if you were audio-only than if you were video. Without going into details, DAI, dynamic ad insertion, was its whole own ecosystem.
Yeah.
Doesn't work for video. We had this problem where technically we could have video, but the creators were not incentivized to. Back to incentives, we launched something called SPP, Spotify Partner Program, in January, about a year and a half ago, where in Premium, we actually removed the Spotify ads, and we started paying out from the Premium pool instead. Which meant that the podcast product got better for consumers, fewer ad breaks, which increased net retention and listening for the creator, but the creator still got paid magically.
The product got better because it had fewer ads, and the creator got paid. This meant that all of a sudden, all creators started uploading video, and since then we've been growing. I think video has grown 50% year-over-year on Spotify. We have over 500,000 shows now. That's on the podcast side. On the music side, I just talked about us sending our consumers to YouTube a few years ago.
Yeah
To see what the artist actually looked like. That never made any sense, but it took some time for us to build out the video stack. Now we have all of the music videos, all the official music videos, but we are also recently getting artists to upload their unofficial music videos that they record themselves. So we have this catalog now, and it is very interesting because in the data, we see exactly what we thought. Music video is incredibly important the first time you hear a song, and then it is not that important anymore because it is the same video.
When you listen in your pocket, the 100th stream of the same song, the video is not important, but for discovery, it is incredibly important. So actually, I think a song is 24% more likely to be streamed or saved if it has a video versus not. It is incredibly impactful for discovery, and Spotify is obviously all about discovery, and we know that discovery directly correlates to retention. So this is why we are betting so hard on video. It has been a huge lift for us over many years, both building and licensing, but now it is there, and fortunately, we are seeing exactly what we hoped for.
Okay. I am going to try to squeeze two in before I lose you. At Investor Day, you talked about getting to 1 billion MAUs on the platform by 2030. Talk to me about the role emerging markets will play in getting to that type of target and how you think about the monetization curve of those types of users relative to what you have seen in developed economies.
Yeah. So we said two things about long-term goals. We said 2030, we hope for 1 billion MAU, and then we said long term, we hope for 1 billion subscribers, just to make sure that the ambition is-
Right
is very high. We want to be the biggest subscription business on this planet, and that's where we're going. We feel very good about the 1 billion MAU. Alex and I take nothing for granted. Every day is a fight, but the trajectory is very much on track for that, so we feel good about that. In terms of monetization, you're right that a lot of the growth is happening in emerging markets. As I said, we're in this fortunate position where the mature markets just keep converting.
Alex jokes and says, "We're using the West to fund the East," right? Because a lot of growth is in the East. But it's also true. This is a benefit of us. We can keep that average conversion, we can keep the average monetization good, but we can actually fund our own growth over here because we know this Lindy effect. We trust so deeply in it. A lot of the growth is coming from there, but you also see us actually being very disciplined about that growth. You saw in the most recent quarter where we said that in India, we've actually played a little bit with the ad load.
Yeah.
We've done individualized ad load. We played a little bit with the conversion gates to make sure that the conversion stays on the track that we want to have it to feel comfortable about the plan. But by and large, because we trust so much in this model and it has so much precedent, the main focus for us is to just keep it growing. What we see is that it's so much cheaper to eat market share early in a market than when it's mature. This is obvious, but it's still true. When you are growing quickly, you should try to capture that market share because we have so much data saying that we're going to be able to monetize it. It's much more expensive to try to buy market share when a market is already mature.
Understood. Last question for you. If I have the opportunity to have this conversation with you 12 months from now, 24 months from now, what are you most excited about building and scaling in this business that you'd want to come back and keep talking to investors about over the next one to two years?
There are a couple of things. I am an engineer, so I am a tech nerd, so I am going to talk about some features I am very interested in. By and large, from a systems point of view, the thing that Alex and I are laser-focused on now is to prove out this power law, or rather, the power law is true, and we have proof points like Audiobooks+, the add-on. We want to deliver more proof points. What I am hoping we can say in 12 months is we do not have one add-on, we have several, and we can show that it is possible to monetize all of these niche audiences that we have in the user space. That is one thing I would like to deliver.
Personally, one of the things I am the most excited about is the fact that because of large language models and the fact that these computers now can speak English, Spotify is starting to become something different, where you can literally today, the taste profile is rolling out in the U.S. as we speak. You can say to Spotify shows you who it thinks you are, and to me, it says, "I think you are a big EDM user," David Guetta, all of this. I can say, "Well, I do not feel like that anymore. I want to be different." I can instruct the system for who I want to be. I can speak to it in English, both through text and increasingly through voice. Spotify is becoming this interactive conversation.
Right now, one of the things I am the most excited about this summer has been something called Running Mode, where we use our Prompted Playlist, and you can go in and you can say, "I want a running playlist for running a five-minute mile. I want it to be 170 steps per minute," because that is the cadence I want to run in if you do not want to hurt your knees. Spotify goes in, it looks through all of your listening history since 2008, looks through your genres. It takes the music that is roughly in that BPM. We have perfect BPM data, which no LLM has.
Takes it, and then it actually beat-stretches the music to exactly 170 BPM, so every step lands on the beat. On top of that, it actually audio coaches you. You can say, do you want a pyramid run? Do you want interval run or straight run? Spotify is starting to become something very different. It is starting to become an intelligence that can soundtrack your life with high intelligence. I am hoping that 12 months from now, this is a highly interactive experience, and you just think of it much more as a friend than a service, if that makes sense.
Great. Why don't we leave it there? Thanks so much for the opportunity. Please join me in thanking Spotify-
Thank you.
for being part of the call.
Thank you, everyone.