Spotify’s post-English AI future - Rest of World

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By Rina Chandran

16 June 2026

At the end of every year, Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds, with users showing off the annual recap of their top music choices. Lately, these reviews have taken on a more international flavor — packed with K-pop and Latino rhythms that mirror the platform’s explosive overseas expansion and increasingly diverse artist catalog.

Launched in 2008, Spotify today has about 761 million users, including 293 million subscribers, in 184 markets. Brazilian funk, K-pop, Afrobeats, and Urban Latino are among its fastest-growing genres, and last year, songs in 16 languages reached its global top 50, Gustav Gyllenhammar, senior vice president of markets and subscriptions, told Rest of World.

Most artists see more than half their royalties coming from streams outside their home country, even as the company grapples with the challenges — and opportunities — of artificial intelligence, he said.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Gustav Gyllenhammar, senior vice president of markets and subscriptions at Spotify.<br>Spotify

How important are international markets for Spotify?

We launched in multiple countries from the get-go, and our largest total addressable markets today are outside of Europe and North America. User growth, particularly in South Asia, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, has surpassed established markets for many years now. In the last couple of years, we’re also seeing these become our fastest-growing subscription markets. When we launched in India in 2019, we were the 10th player in one of the most competitive streaming markets. Today, we’re the leader in audio streaming, and India sits alongside the U.S. as one of our largest markets by monthly average users. So it just makes business sense to focus on international markets.

It also makes cultural sense. More than half of content consumption on Spotify today is in non-English languages, and it’s growing. Perhaps the trigger was Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” — that song is now at more than 4 billion combined streams on Spotify, which is just wild. It opened the ears of consumers to non-English music, and it’s quite common now to see Indian hits — even though they are primarily being consumed in India or by the Indian diaspora — show up in the top 50.

16 The number of languages represented in Spotify’s global top 50 songs last year.

Non-English artists were not compensated as well as those performing in English. Is that changing?

In every country, the pool of money that users bring into Spotify is distributed among the artists being consumed in that country. So in Nigeria, the Nigerian consumer revenue goes toward the content that is being consumed there. But once an artist starts breaking outside their home country, they start generating revenue from additional markets. Nigerian artists make most of their streaming revenue from the U.K. and the U.S. We’re also starting to see more touring for international artists. Latin American artists have toured for a long time in Europe and North America, but we’re starting to see more Korean artists breaking into the U.S. Take our BTS album campaign — millions of fans engaged in-app, and thousands of fans went to concerts and fan events in New York, and in São Paulo, Mexico City, Tokyo, Jakarta, and Manila.

Artist education is also important. We show artists that there are many different ways to succeed, and that they don’t need to go with a major label. You can be independent, like Bad Bunny [who is on an independent label] and others, and from day one, you can maintain the rights to your content.

Besides local artists, what’s helping you grow in international markets?

I don’t think we ever expected the subscription revenue model to be so successful outside of Western Europe and North America."

We have been very diligent about localizing our price point. We’re not expecting people in West Africa to pay $13 a month for Premium, so we’ve found the sweet spot — from a local purchasing power parity point of view — and it is more like $2 to $5 in many emerging markets. We also had to innovate around payments. When we launched, it was a credit card-backed form for Western markets, but when you go to Thailand or India, you need to lean into the local payment method there. So we have UPI for India, which accounts for over 90% of intake, at an 85% cheaper effective rate than credit cards. We have different types of wallets for Southeast Asia, and we were one of the first merchants to integrate Pix, the local payment option in Brazil.

I don’t think we ever expected the subscription revenue model to be so successful outside of Western Europe and North America. We could not, in our wildest dreams, think that in South Africa, Nigeria, Thailand, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia — we’re actually seeing a premium business model work. I think there’s...