Spotify, every mention
203 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Spotify
tap a year for its mentions
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
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 1:14:53 David Rosenthal How do you think about what role for monetization, maybe especially on the podcasting side, um, Spotify should play for creators?
- ▶ 1:25:45 Ben Gilbert Well, as we start to wrap up here, there's one question that I've really wanted to ask you, which is, as I've studied Spotify over the last month and a half preparing for this, it seems like you guys have been very intentional about
- ▶ 1:27:01 Daniel Ek Um, but actually it's been many different things that's driven the success of Spotify.
- ▶ 1:28:23 Daniel Ek Um, so that's where, where, where the early innings of Spotify's culture was like, I'm sure almost every Silicon Valley company of that era.
- ▶ 1:29:10 Daniel Ek Diligent about the culture you create, and we certainly were victims of that at Spotify, because we had taken all these different things.
- ▶ 1:29:18 Daniel Ek There were certainly things that were Spotify.
- ▶ 1:30:07 Daniel Ek And the mental model may be, hey, your music app is so amazing.
- ▶ 1:32:44 Daniel Ek And I would say that probably other thing that's been hugely important and that I wish more people talked about it is there are not many of us, but there's a few of our few companies like Spotify, which in a way has been heavily influenced…
- ▶ 1:33:04 Daniel Ek So that sort of notion of being on the side and watching, um, and sort of iterating in a corner, Spotify's definitely sort of not the overnight success.
- ▶ 1:34:39 Daniel Ek But, um, I, I think it's been hugely important for Spotify's journey.
- ▶ 1:34:51 Daniel Ek In a very unique way that it's probably the most exciting thing for me at the moment, still being here at Spotify, 17 years.
- ▶ 1:37:08 Ben Gilbert Um, but there's a new Spotify feature that we've been playing around with, too.
- ▶ 1:37:12 David Rosenthal Yeah, Spotify just launched this at StreamOn recently.
- ▶ 1:37:15 David Rosenthal There is a question on the page in the Spotify app for this episode that says, what did you think of this episode?
- ▶ 1:37:44 Ben Gilbert Thanks to Spotify and Daniel.
Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired
- ▶ 1:04:43 Ben Gilbert Yeah, Spotify is. ...
- ▶ 1:05:06 Ben Gilbert You know, um, uh, a URL, and on the right side, it just points to my RSS feed, and then Spotify comes along and is like, oh, well, we have tons of users.
- ▶ 1:05:19 Ben Gilbert So much of our growth in the last year, two years, has come from Spotify, specifically because more people are listening to podcasts on Spotify.
- ▶ 1:05:36 Mitch Lasky Like, we have both been just gobsmacked by how, what percentage of our users are coming from Spotify.
- ▶ 1:05:43 Mitch Lasky I would never have predicted how big of an audience was on Spotify, because it just didn't occur to me, right?
- ▶ 1:05:49 Mitch Lasky That Spotify had done that well in podcasting, until we started releasing these episodes, and we were like, wow, like more than 50% of our audience is coming from Spotify.
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 1:03:07 Ben Gilbert So unless there's something that happens, like, you get feed dropped for free in an NPR podcast that brings you a 100,000 new listeners right away, or we had NVIDIA part two, I think, got a large promotion on Spotify, and that brought us a…
- ▶ 1:03:24 David Rosenthal Spotify's been a great partner to us this year.
- ▶ 1:03:25 Ben Gilbert Yeah, they have.
- ▶ 1:03:26 David Rosenthal We really only started kind of more directly working with them in January with the Taylor Swift episode.
- ▶ 1:03:36 Ben Gilbert Of the people who listen on Spotify today were not listeners.
- ▶ 1:03:42 David Rosenthal And we should be clear about what I mean by directly working with Spotify.
- ▶ 1:03:46 David Rosenthal We're, we're not owned by Spotify.
- ▶ 1:03:53 Ben Gilbert Business model, but they assign you a creator manager.
- ▶ 1:03:55 David Rosenthal There's people that we know that we can contact relationships at Spotify in a way that we don't have with any of the other platforms.
- ▶ 1:04:09 David Rosenthal Spotify has done a great job of, at least from my perspective, you know, engaging with us as creators.
- ▶ 2:07:29 Ben Gilbert So I was looking at my, like, Spotify year in review, and I was like, all this is, like, my favorite songs from over the course of my life and my wife's life, and that's where most of my music listening went this year.
- ▶ 2:09:32 Ben Gilbert I got out to, uh, to my Spotify.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:46:53 Ben Gilbert You got Spotify and Overcast and Apple Podcasts.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 2:25:29 Ben Gilbert If you haven't watched the video version of this, uh, just go check it out on, on YouTube or Spotify or anywhere just to see what that looked like.
- ▶ 2:27:08 Ben Gilbert TCV was a major investor on much of the journey of companies you know like Zillow, Spotify, and Netflix, which we spent a lot of time talking with Jay about.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 1:44:11 Jason Calacanis He's on Spotify.
- ▶ 2:09:36 David Rosenthal Right down to the, you know, Sirius, Spotify, like, right down to it, he became Stern.
- ▶ 2:11:34 Jason Calacanis Is it part of Spotify or something?
- ▶ 2:11:39 Jason Calacanis Yeah, it's really weird that, like, Spotify doesn't allow Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy on iTunes because...
- ▶ 2:11:54 Ben Gilbert There's some MBA that's run the numbers that says it's more valuable if it's driving new subscribers to Spotify.
- ▶ 2:12:01 Jason Calacanis Oh, I guess, you know what, they want to be able to have those new subscribers so when they go renegotiate with the music, I saw they're doing audiobooks too now.
- ▶ 2:12:09 Jason Calacanis Yeah, they're doing audiobooks, one-off purchases.
Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:09:26 Ben Gilbert Uh, you can search Acquired LP Show in any podcast player, Spotify, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you listen to podcasts and find that there.
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 32:39 Ben Gilbert We will multi-home this episode on both Spotify and YouTube.
- ▶ 1:24:59 David Rosenthal Oh, the other thing on the LP show, now with it being public, literally the number one most requested thing that we got for anything ever at Acquired was, can I get the LP show in Spotify?
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:37 Ben Gilbert Spotify in their mobile app just added the ability to rate.
- ▶ 7:42 Ben Gilbert So if you listen in Spotify, you should totally leave us a little rating in there.
- ▶ 2:03:08 Ben Gilbert Uh, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts if you listen there, or with the new Spotify ratings feature on their mobile app.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:46:31 Ben Gilbert We will put this up on the video for those of you on Spotify and YouTube.
- ▶ 2:08:55 David Rosenthal Reminds me of what you pointed out on the Taylor Swift episode about Spotify.
- ▶ 2:31:37 Ben Gilbert Like if you like Spotify, you should really like record labels in terms of their attraction as an investment.
- ▶ 2:31:53 Ben Gilbert And, you know, if a lot more people start streaming, then all of the benefit of all those people starting to stream and pay Spotify and Apple Music accrues to Sony Music and UMG and, you know, it's a pretty predictable, defensible business.
Peloton - the entire history and strategy behind America's trendiest workout · Acquired
- ▶ 9:23 David Rosenthal We talked about him on the Spotify episode.
- ▶ 11:54 David Rosenthal And very, very relevant to this news today that I was going to save this for later in the episode, but one of the final questions that the headmaster, who's a wonderful interviewer, asks him is sort of, you know, like, well, you know,…
- ▶ 13:46 Ben Gilbert Like what, how prescient well primed for the ultimate Spotify gig that he would take when he took them public.
- ▶ 22:10 David Rosenthal You know, I think the, the other half is what he learns from this Netflix experience and, and frankly, going all the way back to music choice before that, and then compounds, you know, with Spotify that we'll get into in a sec, uh, which…
- ▶ 24:19 David Rosenthal But in 2014, he joins the Spotify board and he's sort of so taken by both the Spotify business and Daniel Ek and the opportunity ahead.
- ▶ 24:28 David Rosenthal And they need someone like him to really come and transform that business.
- ▶ 24:33 David Rosenthal We should revisit Spotify at some point because when we covered their direct listing, which
- ▶ 24:51 David Rosenthal So he goes and joins Spotify as CFO, and not just CFO, but also eventually he would add, uh, uh, head of their free business, the advertising-supported business at Spotify.
- ▶ 25:06 David Rosenthal The subscription business of Spotify.
- ▶ 25:11 David Rosenthal So originally he moved to Stockholm and was, uh, was CFO of the business in Stockholm and then moved to New York to set up and really drive the free portion of the Spotify business, which is what Taylor was so upset about.
- ▶ 25:26 David Rosenthal And that now that they've built, built out since he, when he took that over, they built that into a real business and working with artists and making that actually work for, for the company and for all the stakeholders.
- ▶ 25:40 David Rosenthal Incredible chapter there, the DPO, everything, and then in January of 2020, he retires, presumably fully at this point in time, because he's 66 years old, and rejoins the board of Spotify, and, uh, uh, and spends, you know, thinking he's…
- ▶ 26:13 David Rosenthal That was back before Spotify.
- ▶ 31:47 David Rosenthal That's what makes Spotify awesome.
- ▶ 55:58 Ben Gilbert Well, if you remember from our Taylor Swift episode, there's a bunch of different types of licenses, and unlike Spotify.
- ▶ 59:17 David Rosenthal God, the parallels to Spotify are just like amazing with like the two different tiers of customer experiences and like vastly different implications of that for their backend costs.
- ▶ 59:35 Ben Gilbert So, because there are very real marginal costs in this business, just like Spotify, at the end of the day, this actually does have the same incentives that a gym membership would have.
- ▶ 1:01:25 Ben Gilbert 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.
- ▶ 1:01:48 Ben Gilbert Spotify is closer to like a buck 20.
- ▶ 1:01:58 Ben Gilbert So, you know, Barry is definitely used to the Spotify world of, we, we pay a pittance to, to, you know, the, the labels and the artists.
- ▶ 1:52:30 Ben Gilbert It's definitely not giving Barry enough credit to call him a career CFO, especially given his divisional responsibility in building the ads business at Spotify, but you know what?
- ▶ 2:18:40 David Rosenthal He talks about his, um, uh, strategy exercise that he likes to do, uh, that they did in Netflix and Spotify.
- ▶ 2:21:25 Ben Gilbert You can find us in video on Spotify,
Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version) · Acquired
- ▶ 40:28 Ben Gilbert And so if a record label signs a deal with you and they give you 500,000 dollars, well, it doesn't matter if your CDs are flying off the shelves or your, you know, Spotify streams are happening.
- ▶ 1:06:43 David Rosenthal She writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying that she completely disagreed with Spotify and the music streaming industry and that she believes that everything about the way streaming is happening is hurting artists.
- ▶ 1:07:42 David Rosenthal Like her specific beef is with Spotify's free tier.
- ▶ 1:11:02 Ben Gilbert Well, when you stream a song on Spotify, the vast majority of the payout goes to the master recording.
- ▶ 1:11:46 Ben Gilbert So from a Spotify play, it's reasonable to assume that a singer songwriter would receive about 18% for both of those credits.
- ▶ 1:12:12 David Rosenthal I'm wondering, is the balance to Spotify, or?
- ▶ 1:12:25 Ben Gilbert So radio, even though you kind of feel like you're doing the same thing when you're listening to a song on the radio versus listening to it on Spotify, it's actually totally different, which is really stupid, but the way it is.
- ▶ 1:14:29 Ben Gilbert At least on Spotify and Spotify-like services, it's about .4 cents per stream, and then that cent, that, that, that .4 cents,
- ▶ 1:17:33 David Rosenthal A week later on November third, after having been out for a week, Taylor pulls her entire catalog off of Spotify, not just 1989, but all of her albums gone off of Spotify.
- ▶ 1:17:51 David Rosenthal It would take until, uh, over two years later in, in late 2017, when, uh, T-Swift would come back to Spotify before the reputation release.
- ▶ 1:18:34 David Rosenthal This is the CEO of Spotify.
- ▶ 1:19:50 David Rosenthal To the world was that the back end of that for artists was going to look just like Spotify's ad to the artists weren't going to get paid during that three months.
- ▶ 1:36:26 Ben Gilbert And so there's all these ways, you know, you want to make sure that you're getting on the right playlist on Spotify.
- ▶ 1:56:42 Ben Gilbert And one of them will be straightforward, and one of them will be a fun deep dive into Spotify history.
- ▶ 1:58:00 Ben Gilbert If you lived in the UK, you could use Spotify.
- ▶ 1:58:16 Ben Gilbert Well, Spotify really, really needs the labels to play ball, and what are they gonna do?
- ▶ 1:58:24 Ben Gilbert Like, Danielek has a specific vision for mainstream music listening happening in a streaming way, and so the three big labels and some indie labels collectively together get offered the opportunity to buy Spotify shares at an extremely…
- ▶ 1:59:28 Ben Gilbert So that's been great for the Spotify stock because it's appreciated the last few years since their IPO.
- ▶ 1:59:43 Ben Gilbert Of the sale proceeds of Spotify stock.
- ▶ 2:02:24 David Rosenthal Now, this was not in the works when Taylor did come back to Spotify, but has been huge for her.
- ▶ 2:12:06 Ben Gilbert 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.
- ▶ 2:17:41 unnamed speaker You have the opportunity by going viral to get an insane amount of free marketing on places like TikTok, where she's always commenting back and forth with fans, or Spotify playlists, or Tumblr, Twitter, yeah.
- ▶ 2:22:40 unnamed speaker And today, people of all ages are paying for streaming every month from, like, you know, four-year-olds listening to stuff that four-year-olds listen to on Spotify all the way to, like, you know, grandma having a Spotify subscription.
- ▶ 2:38:13 David Rosenthal Including Spotify.