Spotify announced it has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings. The audio streaming giant will be using large language models (LLMs) to identify users’ listening patterns in audiobooks and podcasts so it can make targeted suggestions.
Swedish digital audio giant Spotify was a very early adopter of AI and has offered customers AI-powered suggestions for around a decade.
With no monopoly within the music streaming market, and with so much consumer choice, Spotify believes AI gives it a competitive advantage.
In 2019, Tony Jebara, the company’s VP of engineering and head of machine learning, said: “Machine learning is at the heart of everything we do at Spotify.”
Google Cloud owns several LLMS such as PaLM 2, Codey, Imagen and Chirp.
The expansion comes as Spotify looks to increase its earnings through a greater emphasis on podcasts and audiobooks, which are higher revenue-generating formats for the platform than music.
“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 Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s chief product and technology officer.
As well as AI and LLMs, the two companies say they are deepening their strong engineering collaboration. Spotify says it has continually been able to leverage Google Cloud’s data capabilities.
“The collaboration and co-innovation between Spotify and Google Cloud pushes the boundaries of what both platforms can do,” said Tyson Singer, vice president, technology and platform at Spotify.
“The sheer scale at which we are able to run backend services and process data, in addition to the cost savings we have been able to achieve are crucial to the success of our business,” he added.
Research firm GlobalData predicts that the AI market will grow from $81bn in 2022 to $909bn by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 35% between 2022-30.
