Spotify’s Emily Galloway Talks Product Design, AI and Innovation

Emily Galloway knows art when she sees – or hears – it.

The Boston, U.S.-based executive serves as Spotify’s product design lead, heading-up a team that forges content experiences connecting the streamer’s hundreds of millions of listeners and artists.

Galloway joined the tech giant in 2017 from Invaluable, the world’s leading online marketplace for fine art, antiques and collectibles, where she served as director of user experience design and research.

She switched artforms, from dusty collectables to bits of music.

There “we were also trying to drive connections between collectors and one-of-a-kind objects,” she tells The Music Network via a Zoom chat. “So instead of trying to connect folks to the arts and antiques or whatever they might be collecting, now it’s really trying to connect them to content.”

And what drives those unique connections at scale, across features, playlists, and more, is technology. 

Galloway oversees the design team for Spotify’s personalization group, a mashup of product designers, writers on my team, user-researchers, data curators, and others. Artificial intelligence is part of mix.

Design tends to imply craftwork on the look and feel of an object. “We’re not just focused on designing for your eyes, we’re also designing for your ears. We don’t just think about pixels, we think about pixels and decibels,” Galloway explains.

“What we’re ultimately doing is designing a personalised content experience for listeners. And if you think about Spotify, there’s not one Spotify experience, there really are over 500 million different Spotify experiences. Everyone’s experience looks different.”

At last count, more than 602 million monthly active listeners log into Spotify, of which 236 million are premium subscribers.

The goal, she explains, is to “drive deeper, more meaningful connections.” Design plays a significant role. “People don’t wake up and say ‘I want to ‘listen to audio today.’ They want to be informed, they want to be entertained, they want to be pumped up, they want to be relaxed. And we’re really ultimately trying to drive more meaningful connections, whether that the familiar favourites are discovering your next favourite.”

The numbers would suggest those connections are forming.

Spotify this week announced a record $9 billon was paid out to the music industry in 2023, nearly three times the sum distributed six years ago.

More music, more creators, more listeners, more money.

AI and machine learning is an important gel for the matchmaking process at Spotify, and has been since Barack Obama was the POTUS.

Discover Weekly came out of a hack week project at Spotify and launched in 2015, becoming one of the streamer’s first algorithmically-created playlists. Many others have followed, including the AI-driven Blend and DJ products.

“Our secret sauce for years at Spotify really is this mix of human and machine. And none of this is made possible without our human expertise,” she says. “The magic to me is not in the technology itself. But the technology is what enables us to do this at scale. And that’s where we really continue to innovate, because the human need hasn’t changed.”

Read more on Galloway’s work here.