In September, Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström were announced as Spotify’s new co-CEOs, following news that the company’s founder and CEO Daniel Ek would be stepping back and becoming the streamer’s executive chairman, with the new co-leaders taking the reins at the top of 2026. Yet Söderström tells Billboard that, even though he’s only a few months into the new gig, it’s one that he and Norström had been thinking about for a while.

“Almost three years ago, we became co-presidents, and Daniel started handing off more and more responsibilities to us,” Söderström says on a Saturday morning over coffee at Spotify’s SXSW headquarters in Austin. Söderström, previously Spotify’s chief product and technology officer in addition to being co-president, spent the past few years preparing for the extra travel, the increased time interfacing with investors and the greater slate of speaking engagements, like the SXSW keynote speech he delivered to a packed conference room on Friday morning (March 13). And, having watched Ek’s style of leadership for years, Söderström also got to ruminate on how he and Norström might do things differently someday.

“Daniel is a very delegating person — more than any of the other sort of tech CEOs I see, that tend to be very detail-focused themselves,” Söderström explains. “So he started letting us run things three years ago, and we changed the process for how we do things.”

In addition to being more hands-on with consumer-facing initiatives — at SXSW, Söderström rolled out Taste Profile, a new feature (currently in beta, expected to reach premium users in the coming weeks) that allows listeners to command and customize their own algorithms to a greater degree — he also wants to clarify a few things about Spotify. That includes addressing the widespread perception of the company’s artist payouts, as well as how it plans to safeguard against the flood of AI music spilling out onto streaming services. 

During a moment of change within both the music industry and Spotify’s C-suite, Söderström wants to explain why he’s feeling so hopeful, with a candor that Ek often shied away from during the years of Spotify’s growth. “People want a positive version of the future,” says Söderström, “and I am 100 percent convinced that we can get that future.” (Ed. note: This conversation has been condensed for clarity.)

Previously you were helping the development of new Spotify products behind the scenes — now, you’re the one onstage, communicating them to everyone.

The responsibility is new. The good thing is, I have this secret love for explaining things. I used to work as a teacher when I was 19, 20 — and I think if I retired [from Spotify], I would probably become a teacher. So it is new, but it’s one of the things I enjoy about the new stuff.

Your SXSW keynote culminated with the unveiling of Taste Profile. Why was the introduction of that feature the pivotal moment?

If you step back, there’s a lot of fear in general around AI. And I think it’s reasonable, because, evolutionarily, the best statistical response to change has been a bit of fear. But it’s very dystopian right now, and I don’t share that — I think there’s a path for a very positive future, and I am 100% convinced that we can get that future. So for me, it’s really important that we share what AI could look like in a positive future, and Taste Profile is a big part of that.

We can talk about generative content, but if we start on the product, I think we’ve been in this rather dystopian future where you sit and scroll through these feeds, and they’re almost scrolling themselves now. It’s just dopamine kicks, and very passive. With generative AI, we realized maybe two years ago that it is an opportunity. If you simplify this, computers finally understand English — now, you can run this 750 million user research group all the time, with a participant of one. We used to do this with 10 people at a time in offices. The promise here is, now you can do it for you, personally. You see this happening if you use ChatGPT or Claude for a while — you can see it actually doing what you want. So why shouldn’t other services do that?

We saw it for a long time, but we haven’t talked about it because I don’t like shipping ideas — I want to ship actual products. Now, I feel like we have enough credible evidence in the products, with AI DJ and now Taste Profile. And I think Taste Profile is a big step, but it’s definitely not the culmination. It is just the beginning, but it’s an important step. People have a very negative connotation of a deep algorithm — so what if we just gave you control over it? We’re going to tell you who we think you are, and then you’re going to be able to say, “I disagree.” And I think that’s a big step in the evolution of technology and algorithms. It was just never possible before, and now it is.

During your keynote, you said the line, “We believe that AI can create a lot of value for artists and the industry, and our job at Spotify is to ensure that the economics reflect that.” Can you give me a glimpse behind the curtain of those discussions about creative and economic concerns? Have creators been receptive, contentious, or somewhere in between?

It is definitely very different across different groups. The podcasters are maybe more opportunity-focused — “Oh, this is going to happen anyway.” That’s not as common in the music space, and not in the author space either, which is maybe even more rigid and, for understandable reasons, very scared of AI. But with music, it’s hard to make generalizations. You have avant-garde musicians who are all the way there [with AI], and then some who say, “Never ever ever.”

As a company, we’ve made the choice to do this the legal and right way, and that has some big consequences. It means we’re slower — if you don’t really care about the rights regime, you can move much faster. I think there are 24 companies now that offer AI-generated music, and they’re faster than us because they take that route. Back with piracy, we were much slower than the competition, but that turned out to be the right long-term bet. This is the bet we’re making again.

I do think AI is an instrument, and it’s going to take some time to understand. But where I think the artist community is right, where I agree, is the belief against just throwing technology out there as if it’s going to sort itself. I don’t think it does. Piracy is a good example — it was peer-to-peer, it created a lot of havoc, users got free music, but artists made no money. Someone needed to actually solve it. That’s what we want to do [with AI]. We want to find the rights machine which works for artists.

You can already create a lot of new music on all of these services, and a lot of artists are using them, [even though] it’s not that popular to talk about. But it’s also a spectrum: you have fully AI-generated music, you can use AI for a choir or a stem or an instrument. Logic has had AI instruments forever. So when someone says, “We shouldn’t have AI music,” what does that mean? I don’t think that’s going to be a very constructive question. Where I think the big opportunities are for artists involves a rights regime to work with existing catalog. If you look at the rest of media industries, existing IP has always been the most valuable — so what we want to try to do is to create a rights regime where artists who want to can voluntarily participate and say, “I would like people to be able to play with my music, if I get paid for it.”

We already know exactly who did what on every song — we know the composer, we know the performer, we know the producer. It’s a rights problem, so that’s what we’re focused on solving. And my hope is not if we solve this, but when.

You touched on fully AI-generated tracks, which is the more dystopian end of the AI music conversation. Some studies suggest that thousands of these tracks are flooding various streaming services each day. I’m curious how focused you are on that, and if you’re considering putting in new guardrails for those tracks.

There’s a lot of nuance here. There is some great new music being made that’s actually innovative: in Sweden, this band Jacub used something like 600 prompts to create this song that was on the charts, which is interesting in itself. But then with all these technologies, fraud, impersonation and mass copying also gets easier. So I absolutely want to acknowledge that, but from our point of view, that didn’t start now — there’s always been a lot of people trying to game our system. So we voluntarily invested a lot in fraud detection all along. It’s actually not a new problem — it’s just much more of the same problem.

We announced that, last year, we took down 75 million spammy tracks, and I want to say that’s more than anyone else is doing. We have a big team focused on fraud, stream manipulation and paid streaming. And certainly, impersonation has happened before, but it’s just getting way easier. There is no ambiguity in the law — you’re not allowed to impersonate someone. So for us as a technology company, it’s an opportunity for us to to be, frankly, the best in the business of detecting these things. So far, I think we do a good job.

What’s been the response to your annual Loud & Clear report? Are readers surprised by the numbers?

Yeah, which makes me a little bit sad, because it means we’ve done a bad job communicating. There is one thing I really regret about Spotify, which is that, pretty early on, people started talking about per-stream payouts, and how Spotify pays less. And the general advice at the time in terms of communications was, “Don’t engage, because you’re going to amplify. Things die down, and if we just keep paying more than anyone else, the record is going to set itself straight.” It did not. This is my big learning — you have to go out and combat narratives, because if you just let them be there, they become truth. When we do go out with this information, people are like, “That doesn’t fit with what I heard. I heard that you pay less than everyone else. There must be something wrong here.”

We’ve paid out $70 billion so far, and $11 billion just in the last year. It’s been 10% year-on-year growth, and these are enormous numbers. So the point I was trying to make was, the music industry is bigger than it’s ever been, no one has ever paid anyone this much money in the history of music, and people still talk about that the heyday of the ‘80s and the CD era. People will say, “If the pie is bigger than [now], then Spotify must be taking a bigger share.” No — we all pay out about 70 percent. Then people will say, “Well, maybe it’s bigger, but there are so many more artists now, it’s less [revenue] per artist.” That’s a good point — the amount of artists has grown tremendously, which is not something I’m sad about. But even this is not entirely true. This year, almost 14,000 creators made over $100,000 — and not only is that 1,500 more than last year, but it’s actually more than the number of people who made $50,000 12 years ago. 

So on every metric, we are paying out more and more, but the thing I really regret there is that we let the per-stream discussion take root. The record that I’m trying to set straight now, instead of hoping that it gets set straight, is that no one actually pays per stream. We all pay per user, and we all pay roughly the same — to simplify, about 70 percent, [for] Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Spotify. But Spotify has three to four times the engagement per user than other services, and that means, if you take the same 70 cents but divide it by four, you’re going to get a lower per-stream count. And so the solution cannot be to make Spotify three to four times worse, because then we just turn into another service that has lower engagement. 

And I think, for the music industry, the number one metric they should focus on should be user retention. If you’re a subscription [business], retention is everything, and retention is very closely coupled to engagement. So to push people over to the lower-engaged services is bad for everyone. In a very weird way, the lower per-stream is good, because it means that people are using the services more, which means retention goes up, which means revenues goes up. This is sometimes a very complicated argument to make on Twitter, but yeah, I want to set the record straight: the per-stream is an outcome, and we actually pay per user. That’s what I wished I would have said many, many years ago.

Moving forward, how do you address the dissonance between what you just explained and the perception that Spotify pays less to artists? Is it more interviews like this? Is it more artist testimonials, which made up a big part of Loud & Clear this year?

It’s both us being much more clear, and then also getting the artists that want to speak about this to do so. And it’s very helpful, obviously, if artists say it themselves, rather than Spotify saying so. And I’m actually very proud of what we’ve done for the music industry, but the message I want to send to artists is that it’s very important to understand how it’s working, and get the truth there about [the size] of the pie. Artists and creators should be quite excited, because I think the entire music industry says, “This is the pie, now let’s try to fight over it and slice it,” but the pie has grown tremendously since we started. There is no good reason why we’re at the end now. 

Spotify has been scaling up its live music offerings, both in terms of events and ticketing. What do the next few years look like in that realm?

Our core strategy is to help artists, and touring is enormously important for many artists. We already give artists information about where their listeners are, who they are demographically, which tracks they listen to. But a couple of years ago, we started also just selling tickets for them, from all the providers, as an aggregator. And the reason we could do this is because we know who the biggest fans are. 

The scalping problem is enormous. Artists are so upset when their biggest fans get pushed out of the queue for someone buying all these tickets. We’re really well-positioned to solve that, so we simply started selling tickets for them, because we can show it to the right people so they actually get a chance to buy these tickets first. I think we’ve sold about $1.5 billion dollars worth of tickets, and I think we’re gonna keep growing that. We’re not making a lot of money from that — we’re just helping artists, and we’re helping the revenue. I want the revenue statement to be, “Spotify made this much in streaming for me, and they sold this many tickets for me.” We want to be this full solution for artists. 

Spotify is celebrating its 20th year, and you’ve said that you want to be with the company for 20 more years; meanwhile, other companies want to position themselves as the Spotify of the next era, the AI music era. How do you stay on the cutting edge of innovation as a major, veteran company?

People say you should follow the money, but I think that’s wrong. People say you shouldn’t follow the revenues, you should follow the margins, but Spotify was unprofitable for years, while most other people in the value chain were profitable. We just invested and invested, and we keep investing a lot back into the company. That is the only way to stay on top.

The way we think about the moment we’re in now, it’s very analogous to either the original piracy moment or the smartphone moment. It’s a time of tremendous change, but that is the time that companies grow. Google and Amazon got bigger through each of these changes, and so did Spotify. Now with AI, it’s the same thing, and Alex and I look at this time as an opportunity to do more, not less. When there’s a lot of change, it is much easier to do new things than when the market is very stable, and everyone has their position. 

The simple answer is, you need ambition as a company. And Alex and I named this year “the year of increased ambition,” to clarify to the company and to our employees that we are raising our ambition. The reason we stayed around working for Daniel for almost 20 years is because his ambition always kept increasing. We’re trying to be public about that, and we’re trying to show it by the amount of money we invest back in the business, instead of trying to extract value and maximize margins. I think we have a good chance. You’re just gonna have to take some risk, but risk-reward is a real thing.

It’s been more than 550 days since Foo Fighters singer/guitarist Dave Grohl made the public admission that he’d fathered a child outside of his marriage to wife Jordyn Blum. At the time, Grohl wrote on Instagram, “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her.”

The father of three daughters added, “I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”

Until this week, Grohl had not publicly discussed the fallout from his infidelity, but in a new, candid interview with The Guardian, the 57-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer addressed the issue for the first time, revealing that he’s been going to therapy “six days a week for 70 weeks,” adding up to more than 430 session to date.

When the interviewer did the math and suggested that the timeline suggested he started therapy shortly after his mea culpa, Grohl said, “there were so many things that led me to this therapy” in an interview in which he also discussed his deep well of sorrow over the deaths of his beloved mother, Virginia Grohl, who died in August 2022, as well as late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died in March of that year at age 50 while on tour in South America.

When pressed to discuss the scandal further, Grohl said, “I have to be perfectly honest. Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. As far as having a deeper, longer conversation about them, I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem. But I think that for many reasons, I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”

Grohl said after posting the admission of the affair online he had to “turn everything off” out of his concern for “what other people think,” calling that kind of public pull-back a “very healthy exercise” in considering “life within your immediate radius. Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.”

Ambitious by nature and perennially juggling multiple projects, Grohl looked back at the years when he was “overly ambitious,” cranking out an HBO series (Sonic Highways) and writing books (The Storyteller) while recording albums and touring, now wondering what he was trying to prove by keeping his schedule so hectic.

“There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous,” he said. “You’ll set a goal for yourself and you put everything you have into it; the world disappears. Then you achieve that finish line, and it feels good for 24 f–king hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, s–t, I need to fill it up with something else.”

Asked if that endless need to keep busy and fill the hole led to his infidelity, Grohl is described as “grimly” laughing and saying, “No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost. I wasn’t sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart. Getting to the point where I was just like, I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.”

Since that time, bandmate bassist Nate Mendel said he’s seen a change in Grohl, describing the Foos founder as putting his aspirations for the band “in a different place, ambition-wise. There’s other things that have more prominence: life outside music.”

The band took a break and canceled a planned tour after the news broke, with Mendel admitting that there were concerns it would damage the group, who had previously canceled two other tours in that five-year span, one due to the pandemic and the other following Hawkins’ death. “We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug,” said guitarist Pat Smear. “[And] let him know, both of them” – Grohl and Blum – “that we are here.”

Asked if his public statement helped him win back the trust of his wife and family, Grohl pointed to the lyrics from the band’s recent single, the raging “Your Favorite Toy,” saying “I think they speak volumes. Maybe more than I can speak right now.” He said the song is akin to “one side of yourself screaming at the other: I’m almost taunting myself for all of those things that needed to be examined.”

Grohl also touched on how since Hawkins’ death he has been visited by his charismatic friend and late bandmate in vivid dreams. “I have had these dreams that seem like visitations,” he said. “Whether it’s from my mother, or my old friend Jimmy, or Kurt, or my father. And in the dreams, I know that I’m dreaming, but those people are here. And it’s as if they’ve never left.”

In one of those dreams, Grohl said he fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV and he thought he’d woken up to find Hawkins sitting right next to him. His eyes welling with tears, Grohl added, “It was so f–king real. He was happy. His hair looked great; he was tan. The first thing I said was: oh my God, we miss you so much. He smiled. I said, where are you? And he smiled again and said: ‘Dude –’ And I woke up. I was like: ‘f–k, I almost had it!’”

The Foo Fighters’ 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy, is due out on April 24. The band’s very intimate show at St. James Church in Dingle, Ireland — which they played last month in front of 80 fans — will be streamed worldwide on April 6, airing at 4:30 p.m. ET on the RTÉ Player.

Muse’s music is often said to be out of this world. With The WOW! Signal, the British alternative-rock trio once more turns its attention to the stars.

The band’s 10^th and latest studio album is due out June 26 via Warner Records, and achieves lift-off with the single “Be With You,” a track that manages to straddle two galaxies. One, with a pipe organ that will remind listeners of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack. The other, a pumping nightclub.

To launch into the spirit of the new project, Music sent a special tablet 20 miles into the atmosphere, in partnership with Sent Into Space. While floating above Earth, the device premiered the music video for “Be With You,” starring Ella Balinska (Resident Evil, The Occupant) and directed by Nico Paolillo (Deafheaven, BAD OMENS). 

A second package is said to carry stickers for a limited-edition vinyl release, which is certain to be coveted by fans.

On “Be With You,” frontman Matt Bellamy sings: “It seems my light’s been swallowed up, I’ve used up every ounce of luck / I need to leap into the fire, find a higher power, and reach for something new.” 

It’s the first taste of an album that’s a “mix of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves,” according to a statement from Warner Music.

Since forming in Devon, England in the mid-1990s, Muse has sold more than 30 million albums globally, won multiple Brit Awards, MTV Europe Music Awards, NME Awards and collected Grammy Awards for best rock album, first with The Resistance (2009) and later with Drones (2015).

The rockers have landed three titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart, including a No. 1 with Drones. They’re a chart force in the United Kingdom, with seven No. 1 albums, most recently with 2022’s Will of the People, their previous album. In Australia, Will of the People opened at No. 1 for the group’s fourth No. 1 on the ARIA Chart.

Muse’s forthcoming album takes its name from one of the great mysteries of modern science, a powerful 72-second radio burst detected in 1977, originating from the constellation Sagittarius with a bandwidth and intensity that suggested a possible extraterrestrial source. Or maybe not. The source was never located, and the signal never received again.

The researcher who discovered the anomaly circled the now-iconic sequence “6EQUJ5” and wrote “WOW!” on the printed data, a moment that resonates in popular culture and scientific circles, and gives the Netflix sci-fi series 3 Body Problem its backbone.

Watch “Be With You” below and check The WOW! Signal tracklist.

The WOW! Signal tracklist:
​1. The Dark Forest
​2. Nightshift Superstar
​3. Shimmering Scars
​4. Cryogen
​5. Be With You
​6. Hexagons
​7. The Sickness In You & I
​8. Unravelling
​9. Hush
​10. Space Debris

Harry Styles is unmoved at No. 1 on Australia’s albums chart with Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally (via Columbia/Sony), as Olivia Dean enters rare air with “Man I Need” (Universal).

Dean’s signature song collects an 18^th consecutive week at No. 1 on the national tally, making it the second-longest reigning single since the official ARIA Charts rolled out in 1983. “Man I Need” breaks the tie with The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” both stuck on 17 weeks at No. 1.

The English singer and songwriter is still some distance from the all-time crown. That belongs to Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey,” which led for 24 non-consecutive weeks in 2019-20.

The good times don’t end there for Dean. She claims a 1-2, with “Rein Me In,” her collaboration with Sam Fender, holding at No. 2; while “So Easy (To Fall In Love)” improves 6-5, and “Nice To Each Other” lifts 23-15.

After 21 weeks on the chart, and following a fresh mix with BLACKPINK’s JENNIE, Tame Impala‘s “Dracula” (Columbia/Sony) enters the top 10 for the first time. The Deadbeat cut is up 15-8 for a new peak position, and a career best. Until now, Tame Impala’s best position on the ARIA Chart was No. 17 for “The Less I Know The Better” back in 2015. “Dracula” is the only homegrown recording in the current ARIA Top 50.

The top debut, and only new release, on the latest ARIA Singles Chart, published Friday, March 20, belongs to Noah Kahan as “Porch Light” (Republic/Universal) switches on at No. 29.

Over on the ARIA Albums Chart, Harry Styles’ latest release enters a second week at No. 1, ahead of Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving (unchanged at No. 2) and Tate McRae’s So Close to What (up 6-3 via RCA/Sony), respectively.

Finally, new releases from Lamb of God (Into Oblivion at No. 16 via Century Media/Sony), Beccy Cole (Through The Haze at No. 26 via ABC/Orchard), The Black Crowes (A Pound of Feathers at No. 34 via STO/MGM) and James Blake (Trying Times at No. 35 via Virgin/Inertia) impact the frame.