Spotify to use Google's generative AI to recommend better music

Spotify, on Thursday, expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to use large language models (LLMs) to help identify a user’s listening patterns across podcasts and audiobooks in order to suggest tailor-made recommendations. Artificial intelligence-powered LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard, are trained on a massive amount of data to generate text and other content. Google Cloud, owned by Alphabet, has several LLMs such as PaLM 2, Codey, Imagen and Chirp that are trained on text, codes, images, audio and video.

“We’re excited to continue building on the strong and trusted foundation we have established with Google Cloud,” said Gustav Söderström – Spotify’s chief product and technology officer and co-president. “The evolution of our technology has been matched by Google Cloud’s commitment to building the best possible platform for our products to run on and driving further innovation with the emerging capabilities of generative AI.”

Spotify has been an early adopter of AI, which it used for music recommendation algorithms a decade earlier. The Swedish company is now aiming to use LLMs to replicate that across its non-music content such as podcasts and audiobooks to serve its more than 574 million monthly active users. The music streaming giant has been looking to boost its earnings by increasing its slate of revenue-generating formats such as podcasts and audiobooks. It had previously promised high-margin returns from its costly expansion into podcasts and audiobooks.

“The evolution of our technology has been matched by Google Cloud’s commitment to building the best possible platform for our products to run on and driving further innovation with the emerging capabilities of generative AI,” said Söderström. With the expanded Google partnership, Spotify is also exploring the use of LLMs to provide a safer listening experience and identify potentially harmful content.

“Through this expanded partnership, Google Cloud’s AI tools are helping Spotify to elevate the listening experience for its customers,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Spotify also recognises the potential AI can have across their business, and together, we will continue to deliver innovative technologies that benefit their business.”

— Written with inputs from Reuters