Spotify is doubling down on investing in creators. Within the past week alone, the music giant both launched its own live audio app, Greenroom, to directly compete with Clubhouse and acquired an audio news feed app, Podz, to improve creator discovery. But while these moves might seem sudden, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström has been thinking about Spotify’s unique role in the creator economy for a while.

Gustav has been with the company since it was a 30-person team in Stockholm, and has a valuable bird’s eye view of the company’s product vision and strategy as a leader of teams across Product, Design, Data, Technology and Engineering. He also reports directly to Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO and co-founder.

In this conversation, we talk to Gustav about what he’s keeping a pulse on these days; NFTS? Interactive audio? Bundles?

We also talk about:

- How he sees Spotify fitting into the creator economy through their Open Access Platform
- Why the Spotify doesn’t believe in taking an “App Store cut” from creators
- The company’s ethos around building “voluntary” features
- Why he’s excited about the business model of NFTs
- The demand for live audio and why it’s bigger than people thought

We hope you enjoy this conversation with Gustav as much as we did!

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