United Nations of Spotify

Radio201

Sweden’s major export for me was always ABBA. Until Ikea came along. Now Spotify steals the limelight. Sweden’s major export! It’s a service that’s in just 23 countries shy of the United Nations. Its 2,000 plus employees are in 16 countries - they speak 21 languages -.

But unlike other foreign-born apps that landed on our phones (Tik-Tok, for instance) Spotify brings with it the company’s defining values: collaboration and fun! It’s very different from the cultural DNA of, say, iTunes, or Pandora. I discovered this when I listened to our guest speaker in my class, Spotify’s VP or global customer service, Rajiv Vellodi.

This was in the week when Abba announced it was making a comeback after 40 years, and data privacy was being closely scrutinized by Congress. So naturally the talk came back to privacy and user data.

Mr. Vellodi talked about personalization that is the hallmark of Spotify. Since personalization and privacy are two sides of the same coin, students asked the tough questions.

“What do you do with our data?” one student asked.

“How do you get to use copywriter music?” another asked. Do you cut deals with artists?”

Mr. Vellodi addressed these head on.

“We are a European company, and are subject to European data protection laws,” he said, referring to GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation that came into force in 2018. “We handle about a million contacts a month -- not including ten million visitors on the support site, and the four million who post 20,000 times a month,” he said referring to the scale of the operation. Indeed, building a fun experience can be serious business.

Students had other questions about sharing music across other applications, and content moderation. How does Spotify filter content that is inappropriate? Mr. Vellodi’s on-point talk of Spotify’s stringent approach to content moderation using human moderators and AI, reminded me about the recently leaked evidence of how Facebook pays little attention to this. It was indeed a good week to hear a Big Tech company like this!