Spotify CEO Ek punts on price increase, AI music during investor call

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek carefully avoided specific answers to two major questions from analysts during Tuesday’s Q1 earnings call – subscription price increases and how the streamer will handle AI music.

Subscription Price Increase

Spotify is the last major music streaming service to avoid an across-the-board subscription price increase, and EK gave no indication of when that might change.

Despite pointing to limited price increases in 46 markets that did not inhibit this Quarter’s strong user growth, EK said that further price hikes for Spotify would come as part of ongoing negotiations with labels. That could mean that Spotify is holding out for a better revenue share in exchange for an increase in the streamer’s top revenue source.

The CEO denied that its lower price point helped drive user growth which now tops 515 million, including 210 million paid subscribers, up 5 million in the last three months.

AI Music

Ek was similarly non-committal on the recent surge in AI-generated music on Spotify and how it would handle it. In answering the first of several questions on the topic, EK said only that Spotify was commented to “allowing innovation while protecting artists.”

That has already proven a difficult balancing act, with major labels sounding the alarm and demanding takedowns of AI-generated tracks linked to top artists, along with a call for streamers to block the scraping of music and lyrics to be used as future AI data points.

Later in the call, EK expressed interest in how generative AI can enable artists to enhance tracks and create different versions of their own songs and speculated that someday, Spotify might allow fans to post their own version of songs on the platform.

For now, however, Spotify’s approach to AI music, which EK called the fastest-evolving technology he had ever seen, seems more likely to be driven by the concerns of its label partners.

MORE: Spotify reports solid growth as monthly users top 515M, margins improve

Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.