Spotify, every mention
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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 95David Rosenthal 62Daniel Ek 35Jason Calacanis 5Mitch Lasky 3John Bathgate 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Spotify comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 27:31 Ben Gilbert But like you subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and those people are actually subscribed and they're going to get the next episode.
- ▶ 2:01:31 David Rosenthal Spotify didn't enter podcasts until 2018, and now is, I think, over half of the market.
- ▶ 2:01:50 David Rosenthal Spotify is too, but YouTube in its own way too.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:21:50 Ben Gilbert Spotify is now-
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:13:53 David Rosenthal Yeah, right up there with Spotify.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:08:25 David Rosenthal It's, you know, Facebook, slash Meta, Alibaba, Shopify, Spotify.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 21:38 David Rosenthal I mean, it's basically Spotify today.
- ▶ 1:24:20 David Rosenthal I mean, amazingly, a couple years later, you know, Sean, being so open-minded, I mean, he was the, one of the ones who really helped Spotify get going.
- ▶ 1:24:28 Ben Gilbert And really brokered the relationship with Mark, for Daniel and Mark to hit it off, and obviously Spotify to have a huge amount of growth on Facebook.
- ▶ 1:31:03 David Rosenthal Which Peter, partially on the back of this Facebook investment, has now set up and raised officially, and like we said, Sean goes on to find and fund and really help nurture Spotify through his role at Founders Fund.
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:23 Ben Gilbert We are here to welcome, all the way from Stockholm, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.
- ▶ 12:40 Daniel Ek Yeah, I mean, it, it's pretty remarkable, and on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours, and it tripled in the last year.
- ▶ 14:06 Daniel Ek Um, added more than 250,000 followers, and that tripled last year too, so it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone, now on The Quiet Show, which again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.
- ▶ 14:31 Ben Gilbert One is we've had, like, ridiculous subscriber growth on Spotify.
- ▶ 16:04 Daniel Ek And by way of context, just to put, put it, put this in perspective, in 2019, um, you know, when we got into podcasts, uh, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people, uh, listening to this.
- ▶ 16:23 Daniel Ek And today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to podcast on Spotify.
- ▶ 18:10 Daniel Ek So, one of the things you obviously have done is, um, you know, added video to the format, and, uh, this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well, but, um, what do you think is next for the show, uh,…
- ▶ 18:50 Ben Gilbert Like, you, you have massively expanded what Spotify does since the original vision, uh,
- ▶ 21:23 Daniel Ek So you talked about video and, and, you know, on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing.
- ▶ 23:01 David Rosenthal Um, Spotify started on Facebook.
- ▶ 23:27 Ben Gilbert Do you remember in the early days of Spotify when you figured out, oh, Facebook is gonna be this unbelievable channel for us?
- ▶ 24:20 Daniel Ek I said, in the beginning, it started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social.
- ▶ 24:28 Ben Gilbert Cause Spotify was not like Spotify the way what it is today.
- ▶ 25:08 Daniel Ek Uh, so this sort of secret of Spotify was, uh, we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it.
- ▶ 25:26 David Rosenthal The currency of the, the Spotify invites.
- ▶ 25:31 Daniel Ek For quite a few years before we launched, where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't, um, and, um, anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this, um, status update, like Spotify is so…
- ▶ 26:13 Daniel Ek And we kind of got to work together, built that product, uh, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.
- ▶ 26:24 Ben Gilbert You'd be scrolling through your news feed, and it would be giving you these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify.
- ▶ 26:32 Daniel Ek It, it actually still exists in Spotify product, um, on desktop, so you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time.
- ▶ 27:05 Ben Gilbert Um, and yet, everyone here who's a Spotify customer today, when I think Spotify, I think, oh, that's like the easy way to access music podcasts and now audiobooks, but I don't think like, oh, it's a social listening.
- ▶ 29:32 David Rosenthal What do you, what have you taken from him that you've brought into Spotify and how you run the company?
- ▶ 31:42 David Rosenthal And there is a reason why he has built Spotify.
- ▶ 32:30 Ben Gilbert Yeah, you see, I mean, if I were to characterize, like, why Spotify worked, it feels like there's an incredible amount of tenacity and a willingness to run at a problem that, like, a lot of people had tried and failed at before, but there…
- ▶ 33:14 Daniel Ek So the internal saying that Spotify is talk is cheap.
- ▶ 33:47 Daniel Ek And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point.
- ▶ 38:05 Daniel Ek Um, surely thereafter we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying, and it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify.
- ▶ 59:15 David Rosenthal So the big piece that I actually think is the most interesting piece that we got wrong in our episode, Ben did a fantastic primer on the music industry, uh, and, you know, all the challenges for artists and et cetera, et cetera, and like…
- ▶ 59:56 David Rosenthal Um, well over a hundred million dollars from Spotify streaming alone.
- ▶ 1:13:22 Ben Gilbert Jensen from NVIDIA, Daniel from Spotify, and next we have the iconic founder CEO of our time, Mark Zuckerberg.
- ▶ 2:22:51 Ben Gilbert Thank you to Mark and the entire meta executive team that we got to talk to to prep for this, Daniel and the Spotify team, uh, Emily and Lauren from Bloomberg and the Circuit, Jensen, Mylene, uh, Janine, everyone from the whole NVIDIA…
Chase Center + Summer Update (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:31 Ben Gilbert And what happened is when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.
- ▶ 5:29 Ben Gilbert 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.
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:14:49 Ben Gilbert So check out ACQ two, lots more interviews there, and I know the backlog, and it's only getting better from here, and you can imagine that having a great piece in the Wall Street Journal and hitting number one on Apple and Spotify, which…
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:38:16 Ben Gilbert To our Danish friends and our Swedish friends at Spotify, I highly recommend this product.
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 37:35 Ben Gilbert About Spotify.
- ▶ 38:39 Ben Gilbert But it was really dumb, and I'm really glad we didn't go through with it to put the CEOs of Spotify and Uber there.
- ▶ 52:34 David Rosenthal And the people at Spotify were so nice hosting us.
- ▶ 52:40 Ben Gilbert By the way, I just want to say, I know a lot of people are lambasting Spotify's podcasting strategy.
- ▶ 52:53 Ben Gilbert I think Spotify in their music business
- ▶ 53:04 Ben Gilbert They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaining power over them.
- ▶ 53:20 Ben Gilbert And the fact that they did the huge Rogan deal, they bought the Ringer, they bought Gimlet,
- ▶ 53:25 Ben Gilbert Well, if you look at the dollars and since today, you're like, geez, they've spent a lot of money, but they haven't generated a lot of profit from podcasting yet.
- ▶ 53:32 Ben Gilbert They totally bootstrap their way to become the scale player in podcasting.
- ▶ 53:38 Ben Gilbert 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 billion dollars that they spent on content.
- ▶ 53:50 Ben Gilbert They now have bootstrapped to scale.
- ▶ 53:57 David Rosenthal Spotify is the majority of consumption of acquired out there.
- ▶ 54:07 Ben Gilbert But 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…
- ▶ 54:07 Ben Gilbert But 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…
- ▶ 54:24 David Rosenthal And I think the corresponding stat is we grew something like a 176% on Spotify or something like that.
- ▶ 54:44 Ben Gilbert But if you sort of write off the idea that Spotify will ever make
- ▶ 54:51 Ben Gilbert They needed to make another bet.
- ▶ 55:06 David Rosenthal I do not doubt that it is a very valuable, very large market for them to be in.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 1:32 Ben Gilbert Spotify has paid forty billion dollars to artists over their lifetime.
- ▶ 1:36 Ben Gilbert They're now the single largest source of revenue for the entire music industry.
- ▶ 1:42 David Rosenthal Spotify also has over five hundred million monthly active listeners, over two hundred million of which are paid subscribers.
- ▶ 1:53 Ben Gilbert And in today's conversation, we're talking about one, how Spotify managed to get to this five hundred million number by stacking all these different expansion strategies on top of each other over the years, and two, we're gonna dive into…
- ▶ 2:08 Ben Gilbert They've entered podcasting in a huge way that has not only changed the experience for consumers, but Spotify's business and their future as a company, which is, of course, very interesting to David and I, as Acquired's growth has really…
- ▶ 2:23 David Rosenthal As I think we referenced early on in our conversation with Daniel, over 60% of Acquired's audience is now on Spotify, which is up from basically zero four years ago.
- ▶ 2:33 Ben Gilbert In fact, we were so interested in having this conversation that when Spotify asked if we wanted to fly to Stockholm and record in person with Daniel in the Spotify studio, we jumped at the chance.
- ▶ 3:28 Ben Gilbert If you look at January first, 2019, we had less than a thousand listeners on Spotify.
- ▶ 4:01 Daniel Ek I like to say that there was probably this genius insight at some point in moment, but that's certainly not in the case of Spotify true.
- ▶ 4:31 Daniel Ek And there, there's some part that's true with that, but then, uh, more and more what I've, I've realized, uh, is also that actually internally, we probably have the best sounding board of a quite representative Spotify user and what they…
- ▶ 5:27 Daniel Ek And then I and others at Spotify, we were big podcast listeners ourselves.
- ▶ 9:14 David Rosenthal Was it elsewhere in the company?
- ▶ 12:34 David Rosenthal Like to us, like we've lived this over the past eight years, like what podcasting is unlocked and now with Spotify bringing so many more people to the medium that weren't consuming before.
- ▶ 27:48 David Rosenthal It's a little bit like the Spotify adding podcasts to a music, but like we have this audience that is like traditionally very tech focused.
- ▶ 28:05 Ben Gilbert But I will say unlike Spotify, which you can, by virtue of being a tech platform, you can
- ▶ 34:23 Daniel Ek That one hook that gets me in, how many people, you know, in marketing you usually had, and in early Spotify we had eight people needed to have heard about Spotify before we were able to sign someone up.
- ▶ 36:00 Daniel Ek I can tell you definitively Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we
- ▶ 36:53 Ben Gilbert When you started Spotify, you had hair?
- ▶ 41:02 Daniel Ek But if you, if you were inside of Spotify at that moment, um, there was no one who thought that that was sort of the defining moment.
- ▶ 41:23 Daniel Ek Um, and, and then, you know, I spoke to a lot of artists, but, um, I think, uh, there were certainly a lot of skepticism about Spotify at the time, but, but generally speaking, there had been enough things in Europe where people really saw,
- ▶ 41:54 Daniel Ek The sort of, uh, way it's been portrayed oftentimes with Spotify in particular has been like this sort of dogmatic, it has to be, uh, all in with me or not.
- ▶ 44:04 Ben Gilbert Was there something that changed between 20 14 and when she came back on Spotify, uh, where it may have made sense for her not to be here in 2014, but then in 2017 or whenever that was that she came back that the world had changed enough…
- ▶ 45:00 Daniel Ek I mean, Spotify at that time was like shy of three years in the US.
- ▶ 48:54 David Rosenthal One thing I'm really curious on that we hadn't thought about before, we came here yesterday to Stockholm when we were talking with other folks on the Spotify team.
- ▶ 49:11 David Rosenthal And I've heard you talk about that, like, you knew from the data on Spotify that this was gonna be huge, and now I think it's the largest genre on Spotify.
- ▶ 54:34 Daniel Ek Um, he's on, on our board and, um, this was a number of months ago, but like, if you think about filmmaking, it's still, as you said, uh, one of the things about a Nintendo is you have to have the resources enabled to build a game and…
- ▶ 56:48 Daniel Ek But there's also more competition, which is, I think when, when people are, are talking about Spotify and criticizing it, that's the part I think is the biggest misconception.
- ▶ 1:03:28 Daniel Ek And so, probably a little bit embarrassing to admit, but the barrier to entry or re-entry, uh, for me was so high with all, uh, you know, node, all of these different frameworks, uh, even setting up my own workflow for me to be able to do…
- ▶ 1:04:23 Ben Gilbert Did you contribute code to the Spotify code base?
- ▶ 1:09:41 Ben Gilbert So here's some of the data from the PitchBook page on Spotify itself.
- ▶ 1:09:45 Ben Gilbert You might remember that one of the early breakout moments for Spotify was a 2009 email that Sean Parker sent to Daniel talking about how he loved the idea for Spotify.
- ▶ 1:10:13 Ben Gilbert So ironically, while social was the first, Spotify would go on to have concentric circles of growth strategies over time, again, reaching the over five hundred million people now, including being the fastest way when they first started to…
- ▶ 1:10:49 Ben Gilbert PitchBook has all the financing events over the company's history, including pioneering the modern direct listing when Daniel and Barry McCarthy took the company public in 2018 without raising any
- ▶ 1:10:59 Ben Gilbert New capital because they didn't need it.
- ▶ 1:11:29 Ben Gilbert About a third, a hundred and thirty-one million total, and if you look just at Europe, where Daniel was, it was just thirty-three million in only 13 companies, and this was actually two years after Spotify launched, which really shows how…
- ▶ 1:13:19 Ben Gilbert Like that, that actually raises the value of platforms, because, uh, platforms like Spotify, YouTube, you actually can point to, we know for a fact that this was created by the creator, and we can stamp it and say that this, you know, you…
- ▶ 1:14:45 David Rosenthal You've got Spotify.
- ▶ 1:14:47 David Rosenthal Well, maybe Spotify podcasting and then Spotify music at the far end of the spectrum.
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