Signal in the Noise Vol. 230: Why Spotify needs to shift from being a content aggregator to an experience aggregator

Research evidence excerpt

Signal in the Noise Vol. 230: Why Spotify needs to shift from being a content aggregator to an experience aggregator

Barclays | Signal in the Noise Vol. 230

when radio was popular and why Spotify’s marketplace revenues are among the fastest growing

of its revenue lines. This is also borne out by academic research which points to the fact that

consumer perception of quality is not absolute and can be easily altered by familiarity and

contextual framing1 . Therefore, overfitting playlists to a perceived preference mapping may end

up making the experience worse instead of better.

In addition, AI content will likely also bring in a lot more layers of content cost complexity

overtime vs traditional music or even podcast content. Today royalties are largely attributable

to content created by an artist only if it is directly consumed (for the most part). However, with

AI, voice, content use for training, remix, summarization etc will likely need to be paid for in

some form. In our view, an “all you can eat” model in its current form will increasingly be a cost

burden unless the business model adapts to these shifts. Competitive dimensions in this state

of the world will likely go beyond content as services like YouTube can tap into a vertically

integrated and scaled AI stack right from the chip to the app and may be able to scale

capabilities and experiences better and cheaper. Execution is of course not a given, but for

Spotify, the starting point is different as YouTube can be almost a completely different service vs

SPOT.

One potential path in this direction could be to become an aggregator of audio services instead

of being on a continuous development treadmill to catch up, with innovation across the entire

AI startup ecosystem.