Spotify

“I think definitionally she also has switching costs because the CEO of Spotify, when she was not on Spotify, was flying to the US to negotiate for her to get back on. Clearly You can't substitute a replacement and have equal value.”

“At least on Spotify and Spotify-like services, it's about .4 cents per stream, and then that cent, that, that, that .4 cents, Gets cut up between the label, rights organization, et cetera, before the artist. And so it's reasonable, this is a crazy thing, but i…”

“When you stream a song on Spotify, the vast majority of the payout goes to the master recording. So think the label. And when I say vast majority, let's call it 80%. A much smaller portion, 12% on average, goes to the owner of the publishing right, typically t…”

“In Taylor's negotiation, as a sticking point in her contract with UMG, she forced their hand to do the best deal of any of the labels by far. It's not public, but people think it's at least the same thing that Warner did, 25%. But non-recoupable, and given the…”

“So, first of all, the music industry peaked in 1999 with about 14, fifteen billion dollars in recorded music revenues. So this is shipping CDs, basically. I mean, when you look at this line, and we'll link to the RIAA's wonderful Tableau diagram of this, it is…”

“I ran the math on what it would cost Spotify to pay the labels for the same amount of music listening time based on the data that we used in the Taylor Swift episode. So, you know, 15 hours across a month. So I was thinking the same as, like, you know, a 30 mi…”

“Barry, like, invented, you know, didn't invent, but modernized the direct listing and everything that's happening now.”

“So my view is you're going to see both extremes. You're going to see the middle getting wiped out. More people participate, but the very, very top is probably going to increase in value as well.”

“For instance, in Germany, unbeknownst to us, but one of the sort of crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audio books because it turns out that these music labels actually own a bunch of audio book rights.”

“We're actually one of these companies that happily will release something out that's not great. It's probably have the right strategy, but execution isn't super crisp and perfect.”

“Fundamentally how we merchandise content has to be very different for music than it is for an audio book or a podcast. And if you think about it, it's kind of logical, because in a song, it's a three minute commitment of your time. And you can actually probabl…”

“Unlike you talking to a journalist, et cetera, it's truly a conversation one, and the second part is, There's enough time to actually elaborate on the thought and the idea. Whereas you have to be so succinct in how you express your idea and truly get it across…”

“It's totally possible for us to make an entire episode where We're saying totally different things than what we're saying now, and it, at some point in the future, might be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.”

“Platforms probably have a role to play in verifying authenticity. Like that, that actually raises the value of platforms, because platforms like Spotify, YouTube, you actually can point to, we know for a fact that this was created by the creator, and we can st…”

“Yes. And I think it'll even outdo Discover Weekly.”

“I can tell you definitively Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we Couldn't launch in the US as our first market, huh?”

“In addition to that, just monetizing the content in itself is probably becoming an auxiliary revenue sources around them. Three 60, very similar again to mom and pop shops, like where you could do live events. You could be doing merchandising. You could build …”

“One of the big things right now is obviously this is a huge thing, perhaps even more so than music for us to offer monetization to a lot of these podcasters that perhaps unlike yourself can't sell ads.”

“But the better way to think about audio books and podcasting is it's really around a business model mostly. So one way to frame it instead would be Podcasting is ad supported audio and audiobooks is paid audio.”

“Our goal is to be the best partner of creators. No, not the only partner, but just the best and win by basically not forcing the creator to do something, but just offering a really good way for creators to work low friction, but also lots of potential to custo…”

“What I often tell other entrepreneurs is like, well the fact that people doubt you in the beginning, you kind of need to pay attention to that and hear what valid concerns they may have. But a bunch of that is just, like, they're not used to the concept and it…”

“In early Spotify we had eight people needed to have heard about Spotify before we were able to sign someone up. And so we realized that the geographical density in which that happened was actually a key sort of contributor and a timeline, so much of our early …”

“It's been a true sort of emotional rollercoaster, and it is true what you say, but like, for me, had you told me how hard this would have been, I would have never done it. I'm happy I went through it, but I would have never done it.”

“We all believe that these like sort of internet companies that go global day one, that's like the right approach. I actually think. 99.9%. This is just untrue and false. The entrepreneurs have to revise. We all, all are benefited from constraining ourselves To…”

“Our view is we eventually think audiobooks should be much, much larger than what it is today. Hundreds of millions of people who are actually listening to audiobooks because the content is great, rather than today what's tens of millions of people.”

“And so, many years ago, we kind of started seeing them breaking out their natural clusters and becoming a pretty big thing, and it was, for me at that time, it was just pretty obvious that if we invested in that genre on a global basis, we thought that that wo…”

“If you look at January first, 2019, we had less than a thousand listeners on Spotify.”

“Do I think she could have reached number one at that point without streaming? Probably not would have been the answer.”

“If you think about an exponential curve if you really zoom in on that exponential curve, it actually is like a lot of different linear curves. Stacked on top of each other that creates that kind of exponential curve.”

“It's about a little bit more than double that now.”

“But there's also more competition, which is, I think when people are talking about Spotify and criticizing it, that's the part I think is the biggest misconception. Because they hear so many, many people who are trying and it doesn't work where they're not mak…”

“And I think every really successful entrepreneur, in my opinion, has had at least three near death experiences with their company, right? Where you just feel like, I'm not sure whether this, Thing is gonna work, not work whether we're gonna be alive tomorrow o…”

“I think Spotify in their music business has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaini…”

“They totally bootstrap their way to become the scale player in podcasting. So to the extent that there is a big pile of money waiting to be the scale player in podcasting, they're well positioned to make it given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a…”

“One stat that's interesting is from Spotify wrapped for podcasters, they make a wrapped to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience, is that 76% of the people who listen to Spotify acquired on Spotify found us this year.”

“317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live.”

“And what happened is when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.”

“What's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate sort of top down, it's sort of fail. And most of the time, actually, what we see is the inflings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there.”

“What happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service. So they started hacking the system for all these other things, and when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts.”

“And today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to podcast on Spotify.”

“So the internal saying that Spotify is talk is cheap. Because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.”

“So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something.”

“In 2019 you know, when we got into podcasts the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this.”

“Last year Taylor made over, well over. Reported, reported, this is reported. Well over a hundred million dollars from Spotify streaming alone.”

“In many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed.”

“What we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff.”

“While I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this sort of notion that just seeing sort of what all of your friends are listening to may not be the sort of right social product. But if you instead sort of say like, I wa…”

“On Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours, and it tripled in the last year.”