The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Weitzman: AirPods made more revenue than Spotify and audio competitors combined
“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”
Hommels: Spotify had no music rights when he evaluated investing
“So you could say when the time I was looking at Spotify, it was, I'm not sure, I wouldn't say it's illegal, but we had music and we didn't have the rights.”
Founders Fund sold Spotify at $8B to double down on Airbnb
“It was Peter and Brian Zingerman and Napoleon that took what did they take? I think they sold Spotify at the eight billion dollar price, pissed off, what's his name? Daniel. Daniel Ek, and rolled it all into Airbnb at the two and a half billion.”
Record labels only granted Spotify's free mobile tier after growth stalled
“We had to wait all until, all up until we had stopped growing and actually started losing users before they agreed to give us the licenses we wanted.”
Ian Lee: NFT-Powered Spotify and YouTube Alternatives Will Emerge by 2024
“So good example of this is that I think that like NFT powered commerce in Web three, NFT powered digital media and various kind of social media platforms. That I knew or believed were gonna happen in 10 years or so, I think are now possible in the next two to …”
Elad Gil: Spotify invented direct listings to bypass private equity terms
“I think even Spotify, I think, invested the direct listing to get around some structure that a PE firm went in around an IPO, and that's why they didn't do an IPO. They invented direct listings to get around a structure, as far as I know.”
Söderström: Spotify will not build general frontier AI models to compete
“So that's why, you know, there's no point in trying to compete with them for us because we don't even have the same goal. So we're trying to build exactly the things that we don't think they will build. And we would buy the things that they will build or someo…”
Söderström: Spotify's streaming business model took Apple eight years to copy
“I think for Spotify, for example, when we started, it was the business model of streaming. That was the disruptive thing. The technology was you know, a bit of peer to peer and stuff, but it was a business model that took Apple eight years of collateral damage…”
Dash: Dubsmash dance challenges directly drove rap song virality on Spotify
“We started to see rap songs starting to become actually viral on, on Spotify as a result of this.”
Pittman: 70-80% of streaming users discover music via FM radio
“By the way, 70, 80% of Spotify, Pandora, et cetera, listeners, the main way they discover new music is FM radio.”
Pittman: iHeartMedia radio reaches 90% of Americans monthly
“Our radio group alone reaches 90% of Americans every month. Only two companies come close to that, and they don't surpass it. It's Facebook and Google. Everybody else, the biggest TV network in the US reaches about 35% of Americans. Biggest cable network reach…”
Söderström: Spotify drastically rebuilt its app to prioritize machine learning recommendations
“So we actually made a bet on the shift from curation to recommendation or social media to recommendation media. Four or five years ago and rebuilt the application quite drastically. And today we, I would say we are a recommendations based company much more tha…”
Söderström: Artists are shifting choruses earlier to grab streaming listeners
“Because people now have shorter attention spans. You can see the chorus moving closer and closer to the beginning of the song, right? Everyone is trying to optimize for the first few seconds”
Motschwiller: Series A rounds for top consumer decacorns occurred pre-2012
“You look at the series A Funding times of the consumer decacorns that are out there, the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs, the Snaps, the Pinterest, the Spotifys, those series A's were all done pre-二零 12.”
Gupta: Kraken, Spotify, and Google achieved initial growth without marketing
“The first phase of growth was purely product-led, where marketing did not exist? And this is true for Kraken, true for Spotify, true for Google, because the first phase of growth was either reality, network effects, or just a brilliant product in a category an…”
Shulman: YouTube is More Engaging Than Spotify Based on Ad ARPU
“Like YouTube is more engaging than Spotify as measured by the amount of, you know, the ARPU for ads, for example, right?”
Aloe Blacc: Wake Me Up became Spotify's most streamed track
“And it ended up becoming the most streamed song in Spotify history for that time, right?”
De Rycker: Accel backed Spotify at $70M revenue and 1.5M subscribers
“When we invested, it was sort of seventy-ish million in gross revenue. I mean, it's ten billion now. And It was about a million and a half paying users”
Sweden had 25% Spotify penetration when G Squared invested in 2014
“At that time, the penetration of the usership in, in, in Sweden was like, 25% of the population used it. I mean, that's amazing. 25% of the population used the product.”
Spotify took over a year to achieve feature parity in podcasting
“But to your point, that took over a year before we had everything in place that people even expected from a podcast player. It was painful to spend that time, but it wasn't the problem of actually, you know, losing altitude in the meantime.”