Spotify Technology S.A. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.
Transcript
Preview the first fifteen paragraphs, organized by speaker.
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.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Continue the full translated transcript in StockNow.
Access every statement, the English original, and speaker-by-speaker history with StockNow Pro.
View the full transcript with ProCall participants
1 people spoke on this call — only 1 are shown here.
PARTICIPANT LIST
View participant details in StockNow.
Log in to see executives and analysts, their roles, and complete speaking history.
Log in to view all participantsKeep exploring